In a poll commissioned by Time and CNN, two-thirds of American parents said they think that their children are spoiled.

Somewhere in our DNA must lie the key mutation (or, more probably, mutations) that set us apart—the mutations that make us the sort of creature that could wipe out its nearest relative, then dig up its bones and reassemble its genome.

Increasingly developing countries are asking for aid to help deal with the consequences of climate change, which we don't want to give.

Well in the scientific there is virtually no debate over certain things. For example, that we are changing the world. Humans are changing the world very radically, very dramatically. Climate change, which I assume is one of the points you're alluding to, is at the heart of this.

Neanderthals were pretty smart, and if we actively killed them off, then probably we did so in the same way that humans kill each other.

It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the processnof doing.

Even very smart people can try to shoehorn new information that just doesn't fit into an existing paradigm.For a long time the story that we've been telling ourselves is that humans are just another animal. We evolved from other animals and our place in the universe isn't particularly special. What I'm trying to convey in my book [The Sixth Extinction] is that we are unusual.