We have come a long way on that old molecule DNA.

I am entitled to say, if I like, that awareness exists in all the individual creatures on the planet-worms, sea urchins, gnats, whales, subhuman primates, superprimate humans, the lot. I can say this because we do not know what we are talking about: consciousness is so much a total mystery for our own species that we cannot begin to guess about its existence in others.

The most solid piece of scientific truth I know of is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature.

It is in our genes to understand the universe if we can, to keep trying even if we cannot, and to be enchanted by the act of learning all the way.

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

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

We still think of human disease as the work of an organized, modernized kind of demonology, in which the bacteria are the most visible and centrally placed of our adversaries. We assume that they must somehow relish what they do.