The primary problem is not to provide the public with the knowledge of how far it is to the nearest star and what genes are made of .. Rather, the pr….

To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen..

An experimental science is supposed to perform experiments that find generalities. It's not just supposed to tally up a long list of individual cases….

If you can't write well then your ambition to become famous in this way will be frustrated. Either that or you have to get an amanuensis who will wri….

History has got a lot to do with unique circumstances under certain particular cases and grand theories will always find counter cases. I don't think….

I assume the same problem exists in Australia as in America of back-biting and jealousy and parochialism among disciplines - there are the scientists….

If we're going to make a politically responsible and a scientifically sensible claim it should not be stop the world exactly where it is because that….

An ecosystem, you can always intervene and change something in it, but there's no way of knowing what all the downstream effects will be or how it mi….

In fact perhaps the only law in biology is that all flesh is mortal and all species become extinct eventually..

With respect to phenomena like mass extinction, somebody might say why worry about it because in a geological perspective mass extinctions aren't so ….

We do have tendency, now in biology especially to make up stories, to make theoretical biology a kind of game, in fact we have game theory in biology….

As an American I must say I haven't been very encouraged by the way in which the people who run the government in the United States have been listeni….

When the wrong question is being asked, it usually turns out to be because the right question is too difficult. Scientists ask questions they can ans….

Scientists are educated from a very early time and a very early age to believe that the greater scientist is the scientist who makes discoveries or t….

The social scientist is in a difficult, if not impossible position. On the one hand there is the temptation to see all of society as one's autobiogra….

Like all biologists I simply acknowledge the gravity of the current situation. There are scenarios under which things work out well and to that exten….

I am a taxonomist, I work in the descriptive, narrative sciences of natural history. Unfortunately there is this status ordering from physics, the qu….

There are a whole other range of sciences that must deal with the narrative reconstruction of the inordinately complex events of history that can occ….

If I put myself on the side of those who see the world as warming up in a bad way, who see the general march of industrial culture as something undes….

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant pr….

The vulgarization of Darwinism that sees the "struggle for existence" as nothing but the competition for some environmental resource in short supply ….