Words change their meanings, just as organisms evolve. We would impose an enormous burden on our economy if we insisted on payment in cattle every ti… - Stephen Jay Gould

We do not usually surrender the intellectual system of a lifetime for one bit of information that does not fit.

No one should feel at all offended or threatened by the obvious fact that we are not all born entirely blank, or entirely the same, in our mixture of the broad behavioral propensities defining what we call “temperament.”

There are no shortcuts to moral insight. Nature is not intrinsically anything that can offer comfort or solace in human terms — if only because our species is such an insignificant latecomer in a world not constructed for us. So much the better. The answers to moral dilemmas are not lying out there, waiting to be discovered. They reside, like the kingdom of God, within us — the most difficult and inaccessible spot for any discovery or consensus.