Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage?

Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain. These events compete for attention, and as one process outshouts the others, the brain rationalizes the outcome after the fact and concocts the impression that a single self was in charge all along.

The more you think about and interact with other people, the more you realize that it is untenable to privilege your interests over theirs.

With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution.

Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by great writers for centuries, and that have been disavowed by every thoughtful usage manual.

But in most cases even the possibility that the correlations reflect shared genes is taboo.

It is true that raids and battles killed a tiny percentage of the numbers that die in modern warfare. But in tribal violence, the clashes are more frequent, the percentage of men in the population who fight is greater, and the rates of death per battle are higher.