We are storytelling animals, and cannot bear to acknowledge the ordinariness of our daily lives.

Any human being is really good at certain things. The problem is that the things you're good at come naturally. And since most people are pretty modest instead of an arrogant S.O.B. like me, what comes naturally, you don't see as a special skill. It's just you. It's what you've always done.

Pictures are not incidental frills to a text; they are essences of our distinctive way of knowing.

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

Natural selection is a theory of local adaptation to changing environments. It proposes no perfecting principles, no guarantee of general improvement

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.

Mass extinctions may not threaten distant futures, but they are decidedly unpleasant for species caught up in the throes of their power.