As a word, ecology has been so debased by recent political usage that many people employ it to identify anything good that happens far from cities an… - Stephen Jay Gould

Science and religion stand watch over different aspects of all our major flashpoints. May they do so in peace and reinforcement — and not like the men who served as a cannon fodder in World War I, dug into the trenches of a senseless and apparently interminable conflict, while lobbing bullets and canisters of poison gas at a supposed enemy, who, like any soldier, just wanted to get off the battlefield and on with a potentially productive and rewarding life.

True majorities, in a TV-dominated and anti-intellectual age, may need sound bites and flashing lights—and I am not against supplying such lures if they draw children into even a transient concern with science. But every classroom has one <nowiki>[Oliver]</nowiki> Sacks, one <nowiki>[Eric]</nowiki> Korn, or one <nowiki>[Jonathan]</nowiki> Miller, usually a lonely child with a passionate curiosity about nature, and a zeal that overcomes pressures for conformity. Do not the one in fifty deserve their institutions as well—magic places, like cabinet museums, that can spark the rare flames of genius?

Ordinary speciation remains fully adequate to explain the causes and phenomenology of punctuation.