We consciously decide whether to consider people; we fall in love despite ourselves; we entirely fail to fall in love with people who fall in love with us. It is a mightily complicated business.

Ocean acidification looks suspiciously like a back-up plan by the environmental pressure groups in case the climate fails to warm: another try at condemning fossil fuels. [...] Even if the world warms as much as the consensus expects, the net harm still looks small alongside the real harm now being done by preventable causes; and if it does warm this much, it will be because more people are rich enough to afford to do something about it.

Considering the way evolution works, it should not be surprising if every man has got a Don Giovanni somewhere inside him.

Trade is 10 times as old as farming.

Life is a Sisyphean race, run ever faster toward a finish line that is merely the start of the next race

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

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