True character arises from a deeper well than religion.

Sstudying ants just quickly became part of me because I was allowed to wander, explore and find things and figure things out myself. And I saw how much was there and what could be done and how I could make a life of it.

The closer the genetic relationship of the family members, as for example father-to-son, as opposed to uncle-to-nephew, the higher the degree of cooperation.

The work on ants has profoundly affected the way I think about humans.

A paradigm shift is the best a scientist can hope for. Whenever I smell an opportunity like that, I go after it. You have a new discovery that something's working in a different way than you thought. And this is particularly true in molecular and cell biology, which is structural biology and has the least potential for controversy and partisanship among the biological scientists. You're dealing with a concrete object that's either there or not there.

I like what Abba Eban once said during the 1967 war. He said, "When all else fails, men turn to reason."

To the extent that philosophical positions both confuse us and close doors to further inquiry, they are likely to be wrong.