We exist in a bizarre combination of Stone Age emotions, medieval beliefs, and god like technology.

The naturalist is a civilized hunter. He goes alone into the field or woodland and closes his mind to everything but that time and place, so that life around him presses in on all the senses and small details grow in significance. He begins the scanning search for which cognition was engineered. His mind becomes unfocused, it focuses on everything, no longer directed toward any ordinary task or social pleasantry.

The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science.

Theology made no provision for evolution.

Religious belief itself is an adaptation that has evolved because we’re hard-wired to form tribalistic religions.

It’s always been a great survival value for people to believe they belong to a superior tribe. That’s just in human relationships.

The human juggernaut is permanently eroding Earth’s ancient biosphere.

I think that’s my nature, to want to bring people together rather than to try to bombard them into agreement.

An individual ant, even though it has a brain about a millionth of a size of a human being’s, can learn a maze; the kind we use is a simple rat maze in a laboratory. They can learn it about one-half as fast as a rat.

The essence of humanity’s spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another. Is there a way to erase the dilemma, to resolve the contradictions between the transcendentalist and the empiricist world views?