A two-and-a-half-year-old is pretty experienced at making a mess, anyway.
One of the drawbacks of English is you can’t spell things by hearing them.
The world’s going to change climatically. We just want to control the change. We want to have a high quality of life for billions of people as we pass through this era.
If you decide to become a dancer on Broadway, never say who your favorite dance partner is, because members of the media will presume you never want to dance with anybody else.
Anybody who grew up with the space program is a fan of science fiction.
The future of commerce is going to be all electronic. The gold standard was a fine idea, but electronic changes of funds and credits will be the future.
The strange thing about grinding that might surprise many people is that you can grind things and shape them using materials that are generally somewhat softer than the thing you’re grinding and shaping.
The thing about a theory in science is it allows you make predictions. Evolutionary theory allows us to predict what apples will taste good next harvest.
No matter what you may believe spiritually or otherwise, the Earth is clearly not 6,000 or 10,000 years old.
Religion is a completely different thing from the claim that the Earth is six thousand years old. That’s just crazy.
Evolution is not something you can believe in or not believe in like do you believe in gravity.
Our goal in science is to discover universal laws of nature. If one’s faith requires one to abandon or ignore natural laws, well, that person is going to have trouble reconciling religion and science. Otherwise, there is no any conflict.
If you just take a single human and put him or her in the forest he or she might not do very well without some sort of education which he got or she got from some tribe.
Without an end to the burning of fossil fuels, coal especially, most of us will live shorter lives. I’m hopeful, but very, very concerned.
If the argument is, “Well, that was all part of the plan,” then I have to ask: How can you take the lack of evidence of a plan as evidence of a plan? That makes no sense.
Science is the best idea humans have ever had.
People love dogs. This is, I hope, the least surprising sentence you will read in this book. I myself have had long discussions with my dog friends, and by that I mean my friends who are dogs.
There is a deep-seated reason why intelligent, sensible people suddenly recoil from objective evidence when the topic turns to evolution. I think the fear of death has a lot to do with it.
From time to time, I meet someone who will say something like, “I am not afraid of dying.” I don’t buy it. Everyone is afraid of dying. It’s part of the instinct that helps us survive as a species. It’s a crucial feature of human evolution. It’s also, I strongly suspect, a crucial reason why so many people have trouble believing evolution is true. Life can be ironic like that.
When religions disagree about just creation, there is nothing to do but argue. When two scientists disagree about evolution, they confer with colleagues, develop theories, collect evidence, and arrive at a more complete understanding. Every question leads to new answers, new discoveries, and new smarter questions. The science of evolution is as expansive as nature itself.