Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components.

We are the offspring of history, and must establish our own paths in this most diverse and interesting of conceivable universes—one indifferent to our suffering, and therefore offering us maximum freedom to thrive, or to fail, in our own chosen way.

Obsolescence is a fate devoutly to be wished, lest science stagnate and die.

Natural selection may lead to benefits for species, but these `higher' advantages can only arise as sequelae, or side consequences, of natural selection's causal mechanism: differential reproductive success of individuals.

Our creationist detractors charge that evolution is an unproved and unprovable charade — a secular religion masquerading as science. They claim, above all, that evolution generates no predictions, never exposes itself to test, and therefore stands as dogma rather than disprovable science. This claim is nonsense.

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

No Geologist worth anything is permanently bound to a desk or laboratory, but the charming notion that true science can only be based on unbiased observation of nature in the raw is mythology. Creative work, in geology and anywhere else, is interaction and synthesis: half-baked ideas from a bar room, rocks in the field, chains of thought from lonely walks, numbers squeezed from rocks in a laboratory, numbers from a calculator riveted to a desk, fancy equipment usually malfunctioning on expensive ships, cheap equipment in the human cranium, arguments before a road cut.