Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things

The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that make life worth living and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have for living is quite finite.

Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things.

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings.

Our animal origins are constantly lurking behind, even if they are filtered through complicated social evolution.

All the fossils that we have ever found have always been found in the appropriate place in the time sequence. There are no fossils in the wrong place.