Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
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.
In the lifetime of one person, we went from figuring out where we came from to figuring out how to get rid of ourselves.
Death is the ultimate enemy - and I find nothing reproachable in those who rage mightily against the dying of the light.
Unfortunately, with dinosaurs, we haven't had enough specimens to determine how much variation there is within a species.
If we measured success by longevity, then dinosaurs must rank as the number one success story in the history of land life.
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.
We were staring at the origin of a piece of our own bodies inside this 375-million-year-old fish. We had a fish with a wrist.
Honorable errors do not count as failures in science, but as seeds for progress in the quintessential activity of correction.
'Jurassic Park' has a lot of science in it - and a lot of it is wrong - but if it was all accurate, it would be a documentary.
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.
Since then I have held many jobs at museums in Colorado and Wyoming. I have also taught summer courses at the University of Colorado.
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.
The chicken is a dinosaur. I mean, it really is. You can't argue with it, because we're the classifiers and we've classified it that way.
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.
Scientists have egos, and scientists like to name dinosaurs. They like to name anything. Everybody likes to have their own animal that they named.
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.
250,000 species of plants and animals recorded and deposited in museums throughout the world did not support the gradual unfolding hoped for by Darwin.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A new theory is guilty until proven innocent, and the pre-existing theory innocent until proven guilty ... Continental drift was guilty until proven innocent.
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.
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.
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.
Keratin can be very colorful, as we see in birds. We'd expect dinosaurs to be very colorful because they basically invented the characteristics we see in birds.
Often extinctions in the ocean occur at the same time as those on land. Then again, the ice age extinctions lost many big animals, but not many sea faring ones.