The average Mexican lives longer now than the average Briton did in 1955. Infant mortality is lower today in Nepal than it was in Italy in 1951. The proportion of Vietnamese living on less than $2 a day has dropped from 90 per cent to 30 per cent in twenty years. The rich have got richer, but the poor have done even better.

This idea holds out hope that the human race will prosper mightily in the years ahead-because ideas are having sex with each other as never before.

Intelligence will become more and more collective; innovation and order will become more and more bottom-up.

Society works not because we have consciously invented it, but because it is an ancient product of our evolved predispositions. It is literally in our nature.

Trade is 10 times as old as farming.

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.

The body is merely an evolutionary vehicle for the gene