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

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

Left to ourselves, mechanistic and autonomic, we hanker for friends.

We are at our human finest, dancing with our minds, when there are more choices than two. Sometimes there are ten, even twenty different ways to go, all but one bound to be wrong, and the richness of the selection in such situations can lift us onto totally new ground.

I agree that you might clone some people who would look amazingly like their parental cell donors, but the odds are that they'd be almost as different as you or me, and certainly more different than any of today's identical twins.

Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.

Everything here is alive thanks to the living of everything else.