A child raised on a desert island, alone, without social interaction, without language, and thus lacking empathy, is still a sentient being.

Love is blind, as they say, and because love is blind, it often leads to tragedy: to conflicts in which one love is pitted against another love, and something has to give, with suffering guaranteed in any resolution.

Not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares.

I should emphasize this, to keep well-meaning but misguided multiculturalists at bay: the theoretical entities in which these tribal people frankly believe — the gods and other spirits — don't exist. These people are mistaken, and you know it as well as I do. It is possible for highly intelligent people to have a very useful but mistaken theory, and we don't have to pretend otherwise in order to show respect for these people and their ways.

...but I also can't prove that mushrooms could not be intergalactic spaceships spying on us.

Is he a dread genetic determinist, or a dread environmental determinist? He is neither, of course, for both these species of bogeyman are as mythical as werewolves. By increasing the information we have about the various causes of the constraints that limit our current opportunities, he has increased our powers to avoid what we want to avoid, prevent what we want to prevent. Knowledge of the roles of our genes, and the genes of the other species around us, is not the enemy of human freedom, but one of its best friends.

I look around the world and see so many wonderful things that I love and enjoy and benefit from, whether it's art or music or clothing or food and all the rest. And I'd like to add a little to that goodness.