In the attempt to make scientific discoveries, every problem is an opportunity — and the more difficult the problem, the greater will be the importance of its solution.

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.

Far more important throughout the rest of science is the ability to form concepts, during which the researcher conjures images and processes by intuition.

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.

I've found that good dialogue tells you not only what people are saying or how they're communicating but it tells you a great deal - by dialect and tone, content and circumstance - about the quality of the character.

The green prehuman earth is the mystery we were chosen to solve, a guide to the birthplace of our spirit, but it is slipping away. The way back seems harder every year. If there is danger in the human trajectory, it is not so much in the survival of our own species as in the fulfillment of the ultimate irony of organic evolution: that in the instant of achieving self-understanding, through the mind of man, life has doomed its most beautiful creations. And thus humanity closes the door on its past.

The paradox is that, by children taking shortcuts through computer games, through fantasies, through movies that load on all the emotional stimulation of encountering life in a stylized way - all of this is the equivalent of mainlining of paleolithic emotions, emotions about combat, about personal success, about overcoming monsters, about making powerful friendships, about winning wars and entering new territory.