A Lot Of Scientists Hate Writing. Most

The Facts Of Nature Are What They Are, But We Can Only View Them Through The Spectacles Of Our Mind. Our Mind Works Largely By Metaphor And Comparison, Not Always (or Often) By Relentless Logic. When We Are Caught In Conceptual Traps, The Best Exit Is Often A Change In Metaphor Not Because The New Guideline Will Be Truer To Nature (for Neither The Old Nor The New Metaphor Lies "out There" In The Woods), But Because We Need A Shift To More Fruitful Perspectives, And Metaphor Is Often The Best Agent Of Conceptual Transition.

The Human Mind Delights In Finding Pattern—so Much So That We Often Mistake Coincidence Or Forced Analogy For Profound Meaning. No Other Habit Of Thought Lies So Deeply Within The Soul Of A Small Creature Trying To Make Sense Of A Complex World Not Constructed For It.

All Evolutionary Biologists Know That Variation Itself Is Nature's Only Irreducible Essence... I Had To Place Myself Amidst The Variation.

We Are The Offspring Of History, And Must Establish Our Own Paths In This Most Diverse And Interesting Of Conceivable Universes—one Indifferent To Our Suffering, And Therefore Offering Us Maximum Freedom To Thrive, Or To Fail, In Our Own Chosen Way.

Speciation Does Not Necessarily Promote Evolutionary Change; Rather, Speciation 'gathers In' And Guards Evolutionary Change By Locking And Stabilization For Sufficient Geological Time Within A Darwinian Individual Of The Appropriate Scale. If A Change In A Local Population Does Not Gain Such Protection, It Becomes-to Borrow Dawkins's Metaphor At A Macroevolutionary Scale-a Transient Duststorm In The Desert Of Time, A Passing Cloud Without Borders, Integrity, Or Even The Capacity To Act As A Unit Of Selection, In The Panorama Of Life's Phylogeny.