We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free
inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.
We do not hold our convictions dogmatically: the disagreement between
Professor Stephen Jay Gould and Professor Richard Dawkins,
concerning “punctuated evolution” and the unfilled gaps in post-
Darwinian theory, is quite wide as well as quite deep, but we shall
resolve it by evidence and reasoning and not by mutual excommunication.

Author: Christopher Hitchens