Heritability pertains to the entirety of the genome, not to a single gene.

The theory that religion is a force for peace, often heard among the religious right and its allies today, does not fit the facts of history.

Of course genes can’t pull the levers of our behavior directly. But they affect the wiring and workings of the brain, and the brain is the seat of our drives, temperaments and patterns of thought. Each of us is dealt a unique hand of tastes and aptitudes, like curiosity, ambition, empathy, a thirst for novelty or for security, a comfort level with the social or the mechanical or the abstract. Some opportunities we come across click with our constitutions and set us along a path in life.

Consistent style prevents presentation from getting in the way of content.

As a graduate student, I wrote a long paper connecting the dots between mathematical models of learning and language development in children. It was published in a major journal.

Language is a window into human nature, but it is also a fistula, an open wound through which we're exposed to an infectious world.

The great appeal of the doctrine that the mind is a blank slate is the simple mathematical fact that zero equals zero.