The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.

When a honeybee dies it releases a death pheromone, a characteristic odour that signals the survivors to remove it from the hive. The corpse is promptly pushed and tugged out of the hive. The death pheromone is oleic acid. What happens if a live bee is dabbed with a drop of oleic acid? Then no matter how strapping and vigourous it might be, it is carried kicking and screaming out of the hive.

Nature does not always conform to our predispositions and preferences, to what we deem comfortable and easy to understand.

The dumbing down of America is evident in the slow decay of substantive content, a kind of celebration of ignorance.

Imagine a room awash in gasoline, and there are two implacable enemies in that room. One of them has nine thousand matches. The other has seven thousand matches. Each of them is concerned about who's ahead, who's stronger. Well that's the kind of situation we are actually in. The amount of weapons that are available to the United States and the Soviet Union are so bloated, so grossly in excess of what's needed to dissuade the other, that if it weren't so tragic, it would be laughable. What is necessary is to reduce the matches and to clean up the gasoline.

We are at a crossroads in human history. Never before has there been a moment so simultaneously perilous and promising. We are the first species to have taken evolution into our own hands.

We live in an in-between universe where things change all right...but according to patterns, rules, or as we call them, laws of nature.