The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best – and therefore never scrutinize or question.
Memory is a fascinating trickster. Words and images have enormous power and can easily displace actual experience over the years.
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.
Our searches for numerical order lead as often to terminal nuttiness as to profound insight.
Humans are not the end result of predictable evolutionary progress, but rather a fortuitous cosmic afterthought, a tiny little twig on the enormously arborescent bush of life, which if replanted from seed, would almost surely not grow this twig again.
Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant perhaps of the messages buried in its long history. Let us hope that we are still in the early morning of our April day.
Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all. This claim is rhetorical nonsense.
Life is short, and potential studies infinite. We have a much better chance of accomplishing something significant when we follow our passionate interests and work in areas of deepest personal meaning.
Science is all those things which are confirmed to such a degree that it would be unreasonable to withhold one’s provisional consent.
Something deep within us drives accurate messiness into the neat channels of canonical stories.
Heydrich, Eichmann, and company therefore invoke the usual trick of argument for breaking a true continuum that lacks a compelling point for separation: choose an arbitrary dividing line and then treat it as a self-evident law of nature.
The world is too complex for subsumption under any general theory of change.
It is the things we think we know – because they are so elementary or because they surround us – that often present the greatest difficulties when we are actually challenged to explain them.
Acquired characteristics are inherited in technology and culture. Lamarckian evolution is rapid and accumulative. It explains the cardinal difference between our past, purely biological mode of change, and our current, maddening acceleration toward something new and liberating- or toward the abyss.
No rational order of divine intelligence unites species. The natural ties are genealogical along contingent pathways of history.
Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview.
Fundamentalism is rigorously and systematically used to indoctrinate and subjugate young minds. It is a contraceptive designed to prevent intellectual fertilization.
The world is full of signals that we don’t perceive.
The enemy of knowledge and science is irrationalism, not religion.
Darwinian natural selection only yields adaptation to changing local environments, and better function in an immediate habitat might just as well be achieved by greater simplicity in form and behavior as by ever-increasing complexity.