Personally, I think it is possible to build a society that is moral on a nonreligious basis, but the jury is still out on that.

Unlike the primate hand, the elephant's grasping organ is also its nose. Elephants use their trunks not only to reach food but also to sniff and touch it. With their unparalleled sense of smell, the animals know exactly what they are going for. Vision is secondary.

As in a Russian doll, however, the outer layers always contain an inner core. Instead of evolution having replaced simpler forms of empathy with more advanced ones, the latter are merely elaborations on the former and remain dependent on them. This also means that empathy comes naturally to us. It is not something we only learn later in life, or that is culturally constructed.

Male chimpanzees have an extraordinarily strong drive for dominance. They're constantly jockeying for position.

It wasn't God who introduced us to morality; rather, it was the other way around. God was put into place to help us live the way we felt we ought to.

We justify the inequalities by saying some people are just better and smarter than others and the strong should survive and the poor can die off.

Dogmatists have one advantage: they are poor listeners.