You are. I'm just fatalistically cheerful. We all come into the story halfway through, we all catch up as best we can, and we're all gonna die before it ends.

Science is so powerful that it drags us kicking and screaming towards the truth despite our best efforts to avoid it.

But when the flash flood crosses your path, when the lion leaps at you from the grasses, advanced self-awareness is an unaffordable indulgence. The brain stem does its best.

There's no such things as survival of the fittest. Survival of the most adequate, maybe. It doesn't matter whether a solution's optimal. All that matters is whether it beats the alternative.

What's the survival value of obsessing on a sunset?

The most altruistic and sustainable philosophies fail before the brute brain stem imperative of self-interest.

How do you say 'We come in peace' when the very words are an act of war?