Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
What you see is that the most outstanding feature of life's history is a constant domination by bacteria.
Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups.
The pathways that have led to our evolution are quirky, improbable, unrepeatable and utterly unpredictable.
Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components.
If I have any insight at all to contribute it is this: find out what you are really good at and stick to it.
The world, unfortunately, rarely matches our hopes and consistently refuses to behave in a reasonable manner.
Sure we fit. We wouldn't be here if we didn't. But the world wasn't made for us and it will endure without us.
What's important is that all human knowledge be made available to all intelligent people who want to learn it.
When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown.
We must shed the old stereotype of anarchists as bearded bomb throwers furtively stalking about city streets at night.
Always be suspicious of conclusions that reinforce uncritical hope and follow comforting traditions of Western thought.
Details are all that matters; God dwells in these and you never get to see Him if you don't struggle to get them right.
Death is the ultimate enemy - and I find nothing reproachable in those who rage mightily against the dying of the light.
I picture several reviewers of my own books as passing a long future lodged between Brutus and Judas in the jaws of Satan.
Mary Anning [is] probably the most important unsung (or inadequately sung) collecting force in the history of paleontology.
Honorable errors do not count as failures in science, but as seeds for progress in the quintessential activity of correction.
Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress.
No rational order of divine intelligence unites species. The natural ties are genealogical along contingent pathways of history.
Memory is a fascinating trickster. Words and images have enormous power and can easily displace actual experience over the years.
Science is all those things which are confirmed to such a degree that it would be unreasonable to withhold one's provisional consent.
Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism--and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency.
...we must be wary of granting too much power to natural selection by viewing all basic capacities of our brain as direct adaptations.
A lot of scientists hate writing. Most scientists love being in the lab and doing the work and when the work is done, they are finished.
Mass extinctions may not threaten distant futures, but they are decidedly unpleasant for species caught up in the throes of their power.
If genius has any common denominator, I would propose breadth of interest and the ability to construct fruitful analogies between fields.
The origin of Homo sapiens, as a tiny twig on an improbable branch of a contingent limb on a fortunate tree, lies well below the boundary.
All evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence... I had to place myself amidst the variation.
The invalid assumption that correlation implies cause is probably among the two or three most serious and common errors of human reasoning.
World views are social constructions and they channel the search for facts. But facts are found and knowledge progresses, however fitfully.
I dreamed of becoming a scientist, in general, and a paleontologist, in particular, ever since the Tyrannosaurus skeleton awed and scared me.
Look in the mirror, and don't be tempted to equate transient domination with either intrinsic superiority or prospects for extended survival.
The history of life is a tale of decimation and later stabilization of few surviving anatomies, not a story of steady expansion and progress.
An old paleontological in joke proclaims that mammalian evolution is a tale told by teeth mating to produce slightly altered descendant teeth.
We must [it has been arued] go beyond reductionism to a holistic recognition that biology and culture interpenetrate in an inextricable manner.
History does include aspects of directionality, and the present range of causes and phenomena does not exhaust the realm of past possibilities.
Life shows no trend to complexity in the usual sense-only an asymmetrical expansion of diversity around a starting point constrained to be simple.
Natural selection is a theory of local adaptation to changing environments. It proposes no perfecting principles, no guarantee of general improvement
Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.
For Dawkins, evolution is a battle among genes, each seeking to make more copies of itself. Bodies are merely the places where genes aggregate for a time.
Precise adaptation, with each part finely honed to perform a definite function in an optimal way, can only lead to blind alleys, dead ends, and extinction.
Why, then, do I continue to claim that creationism isn't science? Simply because these relatively few statements have been tested and conclusively refuted.
Without a commitment to science and rationality in its proper domain, there can be no solution to the problems that engulf us. Still, the Yahoos never rest.
In what I like to call the Great Asymmetry, every spectacular incident of evil will be balanced by 10,000 acts of kindness, too often unnoted and invisible.
Evolution is an inference from thousands of independent sources, the only conceptual structure that can make unified sense of all this disparate information.
I would rather label the whole enterprise of setting a biological value upon groups for what it is: irrelevant, intellectually unsound, and highly injurious.
We who revel in nature's diversity and feel instructed by every animal tend to brand Homo sapiens as the greatest catastrophe since the Cretaceous extinction.
Most books, after all, are ephemeral; their specifics, several years later, inspire about as much interest as daily battle reports from the Hundred Years' War.
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 more important the subject and the closer it cuts to the bone of our hopes and needs, the more we are likely to err in establishing a framework for analysis.
Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information. It is a creative human activity, its geniuses acting more as artists than as information processors.