I think that's an important part of art in general. Especially in literature, in stories, we play with eventualities that may put us through a lot of intense negative feelings - say, in horror films or tragedies as intense as King Lear - but we come out feeling richer. We've lived to the fullest, we've tested ourselves in these environments.

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.

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.

Art and literature need extreme sociality to a degree that even dolphins don't have. We are the only large mammalian species that has such intense sociality. There are some small mammals that have become eusocial - the mole rats - but that's a different thing. Humans are able to understand one another at very high levels, to cooperate in very large groups. Humans depend on one another in ways that are an absolute precondition to sharing the kinds of information that makes narrative possible.

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

Everything is humanities. The sciences are a form of the humanities. They involve traditions of inquiry; they involve social engagement with ideas. They do not happen with a naked brain going out and encountering a nonhuman world. And the better we understand ourselves, the better we can do science, as well. So I don't see them - the sciences and the humanities - as being at all different.

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.