In many contexts, simplicity is not an aesthetic frill.

The big picture, I think, is that common ancestry is evidentially prior to natural selection in Darwin's theory and in contemporary evolutionary biology as well.

Deism claims that God creates the universe and the laws of nature and then is hands-off, with everything that subsequently happens in nature being due to natural processes.

Earlier attempts to show that simpler theories always have higher prior probabilities have failed, but there is a restricted circumstance in which the claim is right.

I think that the existence of Beethoven is remarkable, but I do not bristle at the suggestion that this event had a low probability given the initial state of the universe.

Biologists now pretty universally regard vitalism as a vestige of a bygone age.

When one theory is simpler than its competitor, this fact is relevant to saying what the world is like.

Scientists often seek predictively accurate models, rather than models that are true.

Our own species evolved under the influence of group selection, as Darwin emphasized when he discussed the evolution of altruism.

"Tiger is a natural kind" and "Tiger is a historical particular" are incompatible with each other, and evolutionary biology provides a reason for favoring the latter over the former.

I disagree with the widely held view that it is metaphysical necessity, not nomological, that matters in the mind/body problem.

But to a Vietnamese peasant whose home means a lifetime of back-breaking labor, it will take more than presidential promises to convince him that we are on his side.

Just having a certain kind of attitude can be magic.

The mind's cross-indexing puts the best librarian to shame.

The last thing you want to do is raise taxes in the middle of the recession because that would just suck up and take more demand out of the economy and put businesses in a further hole.

I like my job but it's not who I am.

Life is a continual flow of events, streaming in from the universal stream of consciousness in such a way that it exactly matches our own stream of consciousness.

People can become anything under the right conditions.

As a ballplayer, I would be delighted to do it again. As an individual, I doubt if I could possibly go through it again.

Obamacare takes effect in less than eight months. Do you realize what this means? If you go to the emergency room now, you'll be covered by the time you finally see a doctor.

I think a lot of times dreams are nothing more than a kind of mental or spiritual flatulence. They're a way of relieving pressure.