We’ve evolved to be smart enough to make ourselves sick.

The regulation of genes is often more interesting than the genes themselves, and it's the environment that regulates genes.

The purpose of science is not to cure us of our sense of mystery and wonder, but to constantly reinvent and reinvigorate it.

Oxytocin is a Teflon hormone - bad news rolls off it.

The most important point of [Susan] Fiske's work is that it provides a taxonomy for our differing feelings about different Thems - sometimes fear, sometimes ridicule, sometimes contemptuous pity, sometimes savagery.

Pulling a gun's trigger can be an appalling act. But if it is suicidal drawing fire to save someone, it has an utterly different meaning. Placing your hand on someone's arm can be an act of deep compassion or the first step of betrayal. The punch line? It's all about context, and the biology of context is vastly more complicated than the biology of the behavior itself.

The gigantic challenge is the magnitude of the individual differences in the optimal set point for "good stress." For one person, it's doing something risky with your bishop in a chess game; for someone else, it's becoming a mercenary in Yemen.