“If there is a human moral to be drawn, it is that we must teach our children altruism, for we cannot expect it to be part of their biological nature.”

The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable.

Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.

Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not.

Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun.

Real life seeks the gentle slopes at the back of Mount Improbable, while creationists are blind to all but the daunting precipice at the front.

Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.

Science is the poetry of reality.

Science is the poetry of reality.

The only watchmaker is the blind forces of physics.

Blasphemy is a Victimless Crime.

The book is true, and if evidence seems to condtradict it, it is the evidence that must be thrown out not the book.

American political opportunities are loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest.

Faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.

Human suffering has been caused because too many of us cannot grasp that words are only tools for our use.

Things exist either because they have recently come into existence or because they have qualities that made them unlikely to be destroyed in the past.

The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale.

My mother is a realist, and she’s had biological and adoptive children, and she said it’s no different: No matter what, they’re putting a stranger into your arms. You don’t know them yet.

It seems likely that most if not all the genetic information in any organism is carried by nucleic acid – usually by DNA, although certain small viruses use RNA as their genetic material.

Botany is based on fixed genera.

The muscles used to make a smile actually send a biochemical message to our nervous system that it is safe to relax the flight of freeze response.

It now seems very likely that many of the 64 triplets, possibly most of them, may code one amino acid or another, and that in general several distinct triplets may code one amino acid.

Protein synthesis is a central problem for the whole of biology, and that it is in all probability closely related to gene action.

We are all connected; To each other, biologically. To the earth, chemically. To the rest of the universe atomically.

We know that he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.