I would be very surprised if on another planet we discovered a species as intelligent as humans that didn't have narrative, or didn't have art in general.

Literature and the other arts play with pattern - our brains understand our world by recognizing patterns - and with possibility. The arts harness our sharpest senses, sight and sound, and our richest ways of understanding, in language and narrative. They were our first schools before schools were ever invented. They develop our imaginations, extend our possibilities, and deepen what we can all share.

There is behavioral ecology, which looks closely at the difference different ecologies make to behavior and other features of animals and humans. There's evolutionary individual psychology, there's evolutionary social psychology. In Darwin's terms, evolution couldn't exist without variation, and variation is important in behavioral genetics. And so on, and so on. There are so many instances in which evolution actually sharpens the precision, I think, with which one can find out the importance of differences. We're interested in differences as well as commonalities.

Social media is your opportunity to reach a massive number of people with transparency, honesty, and integrity.

Perhaps the most demanding trick in all of art is to know ways that are going to capture the attention of an audience right now, and yet to also hold an audience hundreds or thousands of years into the future in circumstances you just cannot imagine. You've got to go very deep into human nature to do that.

Social media takes time and careful, strategic thought. It doesn't happen by accident.

Scientists, to give them credit, do not think of the humanities in a negative way. It's the bureaucrats who want to cut costs who think, Well, here's something that's not booming at the moment, let's slash it.