What are the Chinese doing, what are we doing, what are - so we need, both the developed world and the developing world, really need to be moving, once again, getting all your arrows in the same direction if you want to have any impact.

I did not mean to suggest that autism could be traced to Neanderthal genes. The point is that some genes that have been implicated in autism changed pretty significantly between the time Neanderthal line and human line split.

Letting things slide is always the easiest thing to do, in parenting no less than in banking, public education, and environmental protection. A lack of discipline is apparent these days in just about every aspect of American society. Why? This should be is a much larger question, one to ponder as we take out the garbage and tie our kids' shoes.

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.

It is estimated that one-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all fresh-water mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed toward oblivion. The losses are occurring all over: in the South Pacific and in the North Atlantic, in the Arctic and the Sahel, in lakes and on islands, on mountaintops and in valleys.

There are a lot of things that we could do to minimize what we're doing, but we're not getting back those frogs that I saw that no longer exist.

The Earth is big. There are huge natural forces that have worked over geological time. But it turns out, when you look carefully at the geological time, you can't find anything like us.