... a local, indigenous, American bizarre-ity.

... each with its own beauty, and each with a story to tell.

No rational order of divine intelligence unites species. The natural ties are genealogical along contingent pathways of history.

Is uniformitarianism necessary?

The journalistic tradition so exalts novelty and flashy discovery, as reputable and newsworthy, that standard accounts for the public not only miss the usual activity of science but also, and more unfortunately, convey a false impression about what drives research.

Facts do not 'speak for themselves'; they are read in the light of theory.

Science is all those things which are confirmed to such a degree that it would be unreasonable to withhold one's provisional consent.