It is so hard for an evolutionary biologist to write about extinction caused by human stupidity. [:] Let me then float an unconventional plea, the inverse of the usual argument. [:] The extinction of Partula is unfair to Partula. That is the conventional argument, and I do not challenge its primacy. But we need a humanistic ecology as well, both for the practical reason that people will always touch people more than snails do or can, and for the moral reason that humans are legitimately the measure of all ethical questions-for these are our issues, not nature's.

The contingency of history (both for life in general and for the cultures of Homo sapiens) and human free will (in the factual rather than theological sense) a…

Yet I also appreciate that we cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well-fo…

Details are all that matters: God dwells there, and you never get to see Him if you don't struggle to get them right.

Reason, Observation and Experience - the Holy Trinity of Science - have taught us that happiness is the only good; that the time to be happy is now, and the wa…

So, until we consider animal life to be worthy of the consideration and reverence we bestow upon old books and pictures and historic monuments, there will alwa…

I thought of the long ages of the past, during which the successive generations of [the King Bird-of-Paradise] had run their course - year by year being born, …