Look in the mirror, and don't be tempted to equate transient domination with either intrinsic superiority or prospects for extended survival.

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

Science is an integral part of culture. It's not this foreign thing, done by an arcane priesthood. It's one of the glories of the human intellectual tradition.

The pathways that have led to our evolution are quirky, improbable, unrepeatable and utterly unpredictable.

Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism--and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency.

If evolution almost always occurs by rapid speciation in small, peripheral isolates, then what should the fossil record look like? We are not likely to detect the event of speciation itself. It happens too fast, in too small a group, isolated too far from the ancestral range.

Biological determinism is, in its essence, a theory of limits. It takes the current status of groups as a measure of where they should and must be ... We inhabit a world of human differences and predilections, but the extrapolation of these facts to theories of rigid limits is ideology.