1. Attributed to Empedocles by Sextus Empiricus, in Against the Mathematicians, VII, 122–125, in Jonathan Barnes, editor and translator, Early Greek Philosophy (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1987), p. 163.

2. Science and Humanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951). Schrödinger was one of the discoverers of quantum mechanics.

3. In many scientific accounts of the origin of the human species, there is a story something like this. (Cf., e.g., Misia Landau, Narratives of Human Evolution [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991].) But rather than being imposed on the evidence, we hold that it flows naturally out of the evidence. Human origins have in fact been very humble. We have in fact, by many standards, become the dominant species on the planet, and done it partly by dint of our own efforts. We are in fact profoundly ignorant of many of the details of our origins. It is natural to represent ourselves in metaphor as a favored child brought up in obscure circumstances, and then as hero venturing forth into the world to seek our identity. The principal danger of the metaphor would be if we thought our success due to one generation or people or nation; or if our success were to blind us to the danger we have placed ourselves in.

4. Robert Redfield, The Primitive World and Its Transformations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1953), p. 108.

5. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Brothers Karamazov (1880), translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990), Book Six, Chapter 3, p. 318.

6. Mary Midgley, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), pp. 4, 5.

7. A similar metaphor was employed in The Origin of Species, Chapter 10, where Charles Darwin compared the geological record to “a history of the world imperfectly kept, and written in a changing dialect; of this history, we possess the last volume alone … Only here and there a short chapter has been preserved; and of each page only here and there a few lines.”