The genome is a book that wrote itself, continually adding, deleting and amending over four billion years.

Genes are biochemical recipes written in a four-letter alphabet called DNA.

Every minute, every second, the pattern of genes being expressed in your brain changes, often in direct or indirect response to events outside the body. Genes are the mechanisms of experience.

Trade is 10 times as old as farming.

Uniqueness is the commodity of glut.

Our minds have been built by selfish genes, but they have been built to be social, trustworthy and cooperative.

It is the assumption of this book that there is a typical human nature. It is the aim of this book to seek it. Just like a surgeon, a psychiatrist can make all sorts of basic assumptions when a patient lies down upon the couch. He can assume that the patient knows what it means to love, to envy, to trust, to think, to speak, to fear, to smile, to bargain, to covet, to dream, to remember, to sing, to quarrel, to lie. The 'smile' of a baboon is a threat; the smile of a man is a sign of pleasure: it is human nature, the world over.