After going through all this literature, we realized someone just needed to compile and analyze it all.

These discussions should have been settled earlier, but no one bothered to summarize the relevant literature, perhaps because it is so vast.

The species concept debate has devolved from an empirical discussion into a philosophical one. But this is fundamentally an empirical question. These data support the notion that species can be both units of evolution and products of evolution.

Young people get the foolish idea that what is new for them must be new for everybody else too. No matter how unconventional they get, they're just repeating what others before them have done.

For those of us who take literature very seriously, picking up a work of fiction is the start of an adventure comparable in anticipatory excitement to what I imagine is felt by an athlete warming up for a competition, a mountain climber preparing for the ascent: it is the beginning of a process whose outcome is unknown, one that promises the thrill and elation of success but may as easily end in bitter disappointment. Committed readers realize at a certain point that literature is where we have learned a good part of the little we know about living.

She touted [the convention] in her campaign literature until she lost — badly,