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Take the entire 4.5-billion-year history of the earth and scale it down to a single year, with January 1 being the origin of the earth and midnight on December 31 being the present. Until June, the only organisms were single-celled microbes, such as algae, bacteria, and amoebae. The first animal with a head did not appear until October. The first human appears on December 31. We, like all the animals and plants that have ever lived, are recent crashers at the party of life on earth.

New breakthrough technologies can make it easier, but we've already got, right now, everything we need to accomplish the task of transforming our energy economy away from fossil fuels. Except the willingness.

The order of fossils in the world’s rocks is powerful evidence of our connections to the rest of life.

The thrill of the scientific hunt is to have an idea whose truth is hitched to predictions that take us to new places to explore, objects to discover, and data to analyze.

Try to keep in mind one of the fundamental aspects of science: letting the evidence form belief rather than belief select evidence.

For thousands of years, mankind considered itself the pinnacle of life’s creation on a planet sitting in the center of the universe. Science changed that perception. Leavitt, Hubble, and others helped us see that we live near the margin of a vast galaxy, in a universe of galaxies, with our planet one of many worlds. Darwin and the biologists had their say too. Our entire species is but one little twig on an enormous tree of life filled with all life on earth. But each discovery that moves us from the center of creation to some obscure corner brings an entirely new relation between us, other species, and the entire universe.

Humans are a timekeeping species, and much of our history can be traced to the ways we parse the moments of our lives.

Do the facts of our ancient history mean that humans are not special or unique among living creatures? Of course not. In fact, knowing something about the deep origins of humanity only adds to the remarkable fact of our existence: all of our extraordinary capabilities arose from basic components that evolved in ancient fish and other creatures. From common parts came a very unique construction. We are not separate from the rest of the living world; we are part of it down to our bones and, as we will see shortly, even our genes.

Just as Darwin’s theory predicted: at the right time, at the right place, we had found intermediates between two apparently different kinds of animals.

The clever part is that it changes the question from, Who should I believe? to, What should I do? After all, the physical world is unaffected by our beliefs. It reacts only to our actions.

Scientists are trained to not give absolute answers. It is interesting that in recent years, some have started to do so when talking with the media, because they've learned that whenever they include the very scientific words possibly, perhaps, and uncertainty, their conclusions are interpreted by the media and public as simple guesswork.

As humans, we reflexively reject arguments that contradict what we would like to be true.