We Pass Through This World But Once.

If Genius Has Any Common Denominator, I Would Propose Breadth Of Interest And The Ability To Construct Fruitful Analogies Between Fields.

We Live In An Essential And Unresolvable Tension Between Our Unity With Nature And Our Dangerous Uniqueness. Systems That Attempt To Place And Make Sense Of Us By Focusing Exclusively Either On The Uniqueness Or The Unity Are Doomed To Failure. But We Must Not Stop Asking And Questing Because The Answers Are Complex And Ambiguous.

I Love The Wry Motto Of The Paleontological Society, Meant Both Literally And Figuratively, For Hammers Are The Main Tool Of Our Trade: Frango Ut Patefaciam - I Break In Order To Reveal.

It Seems The Height Of Antiquated Hubris To Claim That The Universe Carried On As It Did For Billions Of Years In Order To Form A Comfortable Abode For Us. Chance And Historical Contingency Give The World Of Life Most Of Its Glory And Fascination. I Sit Here Happy To Be Alive And Sure That Some Reason Must Exist For "why Me?" Or The Earth Might Have Been Totally Covered With Water, And An Octopus Might Now Be Telling Its Children Why The Eight-legged God Of All Things Had Made Such A Perfect World For Cephalopods.

The Basic Formulation, Or Bare-bones Mechanics, Of Natural Selection Is A Disarmingly Simple Argument, Based On Three Undeniable Facts (overproduction Of Offspring, Variation, And Heritability) And One Syllogistic Inference (natural Selection, Or The Claim That Organisms Enjoying Differential Reproductive Success Will, On Average, Be Those Variants That Are Fortuitously Better Adapted To Changing Local Environments, And That These Variants Will Then Pass Their Favored Traits To Offspring By Inheritance).