It's obvious that the key problem facing humanity in the coming century is how to bring a better quality of life - for 8 billion or more people - without wrecking the environment entirely in the attempt.

Human beings function better if they are deceived by their genes into thinking that there is a disinterested objective morality binding upon them, which all should obey.

The naturalist is a civilized hunter. He goes alone into the field or woodland and closes his mind to everything but that time and place, so that life around him presses in on all the senses and small details grow in significance. He begins the scanning search for which cognition was engineered. His mind becomes unfocused, it focuses on everything, no longer directed toward any ordinary task or social pleasantry.

The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science.

I want us to save the creation-not just care about it, but to save it.

There doesn't seem to be any other way of creating the next green revolution without GMOs.

I think that's my nature, to want to bring people together rather than to try to bombard them into agreement.