I would rather label the whole enterprise of setting a biological value upon groups for what it is: irrelevant, intellectually unsound, and highly injurious.
People may believe correct things for the damndest and weirdest of wrong reasons.
People are clever, but almost no one ever devises an optimal quip precisely at the needed moment. Therefore, virtually all great one-liners are later inventions – words that people wished they had spouted, but failed to manufacture at the truly opportune instant.
Antiessentialist thinking forces us to view the world differently. We must accept shadings and continua as fundamental. We lose criteria for judgment by comparison to some ideal: short people, retarded people, people of other beliefs, colors, and religions are people of full status.
If a man dies of cancer in fear and despair, then cry for his pain and celebrate his life. The other man, who fought like hell and laughed in the end, but also died, may have had an easier time in his final months, but took his leave with no more humanity.
Guessing right for the wrong reason does not merit scientific immortality.
Eternal vigilance, as they say, is the price of freedom. Add intellectual integrity to the cost basis.
The enemy is not fundamentalism; it is intolerance. In this case, the intolerance is perverse since it masquerades under the “liberal” rhetoric of “equal time.” But mistake it not.
Zoocentrism is the primary fallacy of human sociobiology, for this view of human behavior rests on the argument that if the actions of “lower” animals with simple nervous systems arise as genetic products of natural selection, then human behavior should have a similar basis.
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.
Advocates for a single line of progress encounter their greatest stumbling block when they try to find a smooth link between the apparently disparate designs of the invertebrates and vertebrates.
The median isn’t the message.
The journalistic tradition so exalts novelty and flashy discovery, as reputable and newsworthy, that standard accounts for the public not only miss the usual activity of science but also, and more unfortunately, convey a false impression about what drives research.
In our struggle to understand the history of life, we must learn where to place the boundary between contingent and unpredictable events that occur but once and the more repeatable, lawlike phenomenon that may pervade life’s history as generalities.
The real tragedy of human existence is not that we are nasty by nature, but that a cruel structural asymmetry grants to rare events of meanness such power to shape our history.
The only universal attribute of scientific statements resides in their potential fallibility. If a claim cannot be disproven, it does not belong to the enterprise of science.
Natural selection is a theory of local adaptation to changing environments. It proposes no perfecting principles, no guarantee of general improvement.
Mass extinctions may not threaten distant futures, but they are decidedly unpleasant for species caught up in the throes of their power.
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.