Is uniformitarianism necessary?

Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components.

I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

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.

We cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well - for we will not fight to save what we do not love.

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.

Ordinary speciation remains fully adequate to explain the causes and phenomenology of punctuation.

Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.

The center of human nature is rooted in ten thousand ordinary acts of kindness that define our days.

If genius has any common denominator, I would propose breadth of interest and the ability to construct fruitful analogies between fields.

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.

When consent takes the form of seeking to possess the things we wish, this is called desire. When consent takes the form of enjoying the things we wish, this is called joy.

Much of our lives are wasted by finding reality, even though we live in unstable nature and with many irrational laws.

I would come to L.A. for a job, but I love New York.

It is, I admit, mere imagination; but how often is imagination the mother of truth?

Anyone who's making a huge impact or speaking out about what they believe in or who's brave enough to be themselves is a superhero to me.

Everywhere, authority and tradition have to justify themselves in the face of questions.

Gazzy: "Just Ten?" Angel: "No." Gazzy: "Five?" Angel: "No.

Sometimes I feel only I can stop myself.

You have to be responsible for the energy you're putting out into the world.

In all the years I played, he (Stan Williams) was the only guy who ever scared me and he was on my team.