The more self-aware an animal is, the more empathetic it tends to be.

I think we need to start thinking about grounding our moral systems in our biology.

Popular culture bombards us with examples of animals being humanized for all sorts of purposes, ranging from education to entertainment to satire to propaganda. Walt Disney, for example, made us forget that Mickey is a mouse, and Donald a duck. George Orwell laid a cover of human societal ills over a population of livestock.

The role of inequity in society is grossly underestimated. Inequity is not good for your health, basically.

When someone brutally kills someone else, we call him "animalistic." But we consider ourselves "human" when we give to the poor.

To endow animals with human emotions has long been a scientific taboo. But if we do not, we risk missing something fundamental, about both animals and us.

We start out postulating sharp boundaries, such as between humans and apes, or between apes and monkeys, but are in fact dealing with sand castles that lose much of their structure when the sea of knowledge washes over them. They turn into hills, leveled ever more, until we are back to where evolutionary theory always leads us: a gently sloping beach.