By any rational measure, this world belongs to microbes. They were mastering the subtleties of evolution three billion years before the first multicellular organism appeared. They continue to evolve and adapt in a tiny fraction of the time it takes us to reproduce once. They flourish in polar ice caps, in boiling water, and amid radioactive waste. We exist only because some of them find us useful. Ninety percent of the cells in our bodies are bacteria. The entirety of human evolution has taken place in an environment saturated with microbes, and humans are so firmly adapted to the routine of sheltering allies and rebuffing enemies that the removal of either can devastate our defense systems.

—Nathanael Johnson, “The Revolution Will Not Be Pasteurized“

[I]gnorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

—Charles Darwin, as quoted in Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (Ballantine Books: 1995), p. 266.

Stein (speaking about the Holocaust): …that was horrifying beyond words, and that’s where science — in my opinion, this is just an opinion — that’s where science leads you.

Crouch: That’s right.

Stein: … Love of God and compassion and empathy leads you to a very glorious place, and science leads you to killing people.

Crouch: Good word, good word.

It’s almost like he doesn’t know any religious history. Even in this century, over 800 million people have died due to religious conflict.

(via Friendly Atheist)

In 1938, when pesticides were first introduced, farmers used roughly 50 million pounds of them and suffered about a 7 percent loss of their field crops. By comparison, in 2000 they used nearly a billion pounds of pesticides. Crop losses? Thirteen percent.

—Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (HarperCollins: 2007), p. 165.

Just because Intelligent Design theorists cannot think of how nature could have created something through evolution, that does not mean that scientists will not be able to do so either. Intelligent Design is a remarkably uncreative theory that abandons the search for understanding at the very point where it is most needed. If Intelligent Design is really a science, then the burden is on its scientists to discover the mechanisms used by the Intelligent Designer. And if those mechanisms turn out to be natural forces, then no supernatural force is necessary, and they can simply change their name to evolutionary scientists and get to work.

—Michael Shermer, Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design (Times Books, 2006), p. 80.