Darwin's principle of natural selection leads to the prediction that the proper way to analyze any evolutionary development is to see the new features as adaptive to environments. And that's a perfectly good principle. The problem is that there are many evolutionary biologists who view everything that happens in evolution as directly evolved for adaptive benefit. And that just doesn't work. Whenever you build a structure for adaptive reasons, the structure is going to exhibit properties that have nothing to do with adaptation. They're just side consequences.

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

Life is short, and potential studies infinite. We have a much better chance of accomplishing something significant when we follow our passionate interests and work in areas of deepest personal meaning.

It's true that the level of scientific knowledge among adults is very low, but that's not because there isn't a natural interest. I think most kids are fascinated by the natural world. I've often said that if you could quantify the mental power involved in all the dinosaur names correctly known and correctly spelled by 5-year-old kids in America, you could move any mountain on earth.

The basic formulation, or bare-bones mechanics, of natural selection is a disarmingly simple argument, based on three undeniable facts (overproduction of offspring, variation, and heritability) and one syllogistic inference (natural selection, or the claim that organisms enjoying differential reproductive success will, on average, be those variants that are fortuitously better adapted to changing local environments, and that these variants will then pass their favored traits to offspring by inheritance).

The history of life is a tale of decimation and later stabilization of few surviving anatomies, not a story of steady expansion and progress.

The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.