Misunderstanding of probability may be the greatest of all general impediments to scientific literacy. - Stephen Jay Gould

No one doubts that biological universals exist. We must sleep, eat, and grow older, and we are not about to give up procreation; almost all our social institutions are influenced by these imperatives.

Common sense is a very poor guide to scientific insight for it represents cultural prejudice more often than it reflects the native honesty of a small boy before the naked emperor.

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 time we identified a bonus as a pecuniary advantage (from the Latin pecus, or cattle, a verbal fossil from a former commercial reality).