To be anthropocentric is to remain unaware of the limits of human nature, the significance of biological processes underlying human behavior, and the deeper meaning of long-term genetic evolution.

One difference between ants and humans is that while ants send their old women off to war, humans send their young men.

[W]hen the martyr's righteous forebrain is exploded by the executioner's bullet and his mind disintegrates, what then? Can we safely assume that all those millions of neural circuits will be reconstituted in an immaterial state, so the conscious mind carries on?

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.

Every kid has a bug period, I like to say, and I just got so fascinated and I had that experience, that wonderful life of being able to go out on my own without really any supervision at all. I just lucked out that way. I was trusted as a kid.

So in my freshman year at the University of Alabama, learning the literature on evolution, what was known about it biologically, just gradually transformed me by taking me out of literalism and increasingly into a more secular, scientific view of the world.

Karl Marx was right, socialism works, it is just that he had the wrong species