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.

Ecology, like genetics, is not about equilibrium states. It is about change, change and change. Nothing stays the same forever.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.