We are glorious accidents of an unpredictable process with no drive to complexity, not the expected results of evolutionary principles that yearn to produce a creature capable of understanding the mode of its own necessary construction.

Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from apelike ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered.

Sure we fit. We wouldn't be here if we didn't. But the world wasn't made for us and it will endure without us.

...we must be wary of granting too much power to natural selection by viewing all basic capacities of our brain as direct adaptations.

World views are social constructions and they channel the search for facts. But facts are found and knowledge progresses, however fitfully.

The myriad valleys could have arisen anywhere on the landscape. The current positions are quite accidental. If we could repeat the experiment, we might obtain no valleys at all, or a completely different system. Yet we now stand at the shore line contemplating the fine spacing of valleys and their even contact with the sea. How easy it is to be misled and to assume that no other landscape could possibly have arisen.

Our searches for numerical order lead as often to terminal nuttiness as to profound insight.