Survival, in the cool economics of biology, means simply the persistence of one's own genes in the generations to follow.

Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrasment...They do everything but watch television.

I maintain, despite the moment's evidence against the claim, that we are born and grow up with a fondness for each other, and we have genes for that. We can be talked out of it, for the genetic message is like a distant music, and some of us are hard-of-hearing. Societies are noisy affairs, drowning out the sound of ourselves and our connection.

We live in a dancing matrix of viruses; they dart, rather like bees, from organism to organism, from plant to insect to mammal to me and back again, and into the sea, tugging along pieces of this genome, strings of genes from that, transplanting grafts of DNA, passing around heredity as though at a great party.

For total greed, rapacity, heartlessness, and irresponsibility there is nothing to match a nation.

The gift of language is the single human trait that marks us all genetically, setting us apart from the rest of life.

We habitually engage in meddling with nature. Until this century most of this meddling was good. Witness the preservation of the European countryside. But since then we've smoked it up and littered it and dumped too much in too many waters. I don't think it's our privilege to behave this way.