Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The median isn't the message.
Is uniformitarianism necessary?
No one-liner can ever be optimal.
We pass through this world but once.
... a local, indigenous, American bizarre-ity.
Nature is what she is - amoral and persistent.
So much of science proceeds by telling stories.
I hardly recognize what I do well. I just do it.
The world is full of signals that we don't perceive.
Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview.
The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm.
Evolution is a process of constant branching and expansion.
The dogmatist within is always worse than the enemy without.
... each with its own beauty, and each with a story to tell.
Current utility and historical origin are different subjects.
Human life is the result of a glorious evolutionary accident.
The enemy of knowledge and science is irrationalism, not religion
History employs evolution to structure biological events in time.
... no compelling data to support its anachronistic social Darwinism.
Theory-free science makes about as much sense as value-free politics.
Facts do not 'speak for themselves'; they are read in the light of theory.
Guessing right for the wrong reason does not merit scientific immortality.
The causes of life's history [cannot] resolve the riddle of life's meaning.
Obsolescence is a fate devoutly to be wished, lest science stagnate and die.
The world is too complex for subsumption under any general theory of change.
Nothing matches the holiness and fascination of accurate and intricate detail.
Great theories are expansive; failures mire us in dogmatism and tunnel vision.
People may believe correct things for the damndest and weirdest of wrong reasons.
Any decent writer writes because there's some deep internal need to keep learning.
Contingency is a thing unto itself, not the titration of determinism by randomness.
If there is any consistent enemy of science, it is not religion, but irrationalism.
Science simply cannot adjudicate the issue of God's possible superintendence of nature.
The proof of evolution lies in those adaptations that arise from improbable foundations.
Our searches for numerical order lead as often to terminal nuttiness as to profound insight.
Evolution is one of the two or three most primally fascinating subjects in all the sciences.
Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information; it is a creative human activity.
Misunderstanding of probability may be the greatest of all impediments to scientific literacy.
Charles Darwin viewed the fossil record more as an embarrassment than as an aid to his theory.
Something deep within us drives accurate messiness into the neat channels of canonical stories.
I can envision observations and experiments that would disprove any evolutionary theory I know.
We are storytelling animals, and cannot bear to acknowledge the ordinariness of our daily lives.
Pictures are not incidental frills to a text; they are essences of our distinctive way of knowing.
Ordinary speciation remains fully adequate to explain the causes and phenomenology of punctuation.
A man does not attain the status of Galileo merely because he is persecuted; he must also be right.
[Evolution is] one of the best documented, most compelling and exciting concepts in all of science.
The center of human nature is rooted in ten thousand ordinary acts of kindness that define our days.
I don't think academic writing ever was wonderful. However, science used to be much less specialized.
Eternal vigilance, as they say, is the price of freedom. Add intellectual integrity to the cost basis.
The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question.
All science is intelligent inference; excessive literalism is delusion, not a humble bowing to evidence.