If humans are organisms like every other organism - which they are - then we should expect that if there are some domains where real scientific progress is possible, then there are others where it is not.

In a democracy the day when you pay your taxes, April 15, would be a day of celebration, because you're getting together to provide resources for the programs you decided on.

For example, the insurance industries and the big banks are absolutely euphoric now - on the business pages they don't even conceal it - because they've succeeded in coming out of the crisis even stronger than they were before, and in a better position to lay the basis for the next crisis. But they don't care, because they'll get bailed out again. That's class consciousness with a vengeance.

I doubt that national languages will disappear. In fact, to some extent they're becoming more diverse, like in Europe.

Popular struggles to bring about a freer and more just society have been resisted by violence and repression, and massive efforts to control opinion and attitudes. Over time, however, they have met with considerable success, even though there is a long way to go, and there is often regression.

I did not say that language as a completed system emerged in an individual in an instant. But I cannot think of a coherent alternative to the idea that mutations take place in individuals, not communities, so that whatever rewiring of the brain yielded the apparently unique properties of language, specifically recursive generation of hierarchically structured expressions, would therefore have taken place in an individual, and only later been used among individuals who had inherited this capacity.

[According to the rigid dogma] we have to believe the United States would have so-called liberated Iraq even if its main products were lettuce and pickles and the main energy resource of the world were in central Africa.