I am particularly fond of [Emmanuel Mendes da Costa's] Natural History of Fossils because this treatise, more than any other work written in English, records a short episode expressing one of the grand false starts in the history of natural science-and nothing can be quite so informative and instructive as a juicy mistake.

Very little comes easily to our poor, benighted species (the first creature, after all, to experiment with the novel evolutionary inventions of self-conscious …

[T]ruly grand and powerful theories [:] do not and cannot rest upon single observations. Evolution is an inference from thousands of independent sources, the o…

Very few people, including authors willing to commit to paper, ever really read primary sources-certainly not in necessary depth and comtemplation, and often n…

The whole system has been long since swept away, and its records merely remain as illustrations of perverted ingenuity.

There is no harm in being sometimes wrong - especially if one is promptly found out.

The road to wisdom? - Well, it's plain and simple to express: Err and err and err again but less and less and less.