People are under the impression that dictionaries legislate language. What a dictionary does is keep track of usages over time.

There's guilt about our treatment of native peoples in modern intellectual life, and an unwillingness to acknowledge there could be anything good about Western culture.

The likelihood that inborn differences are one contributor to social status does not mean that it is the only contributor.

You could think of an ecosystem as a bunch of antagonistic arms races, almost: Everything that an animal depends upon for food is the body part of some other animal or plant who would just as soon keep that body part for itself.

Fiction is empathy technology.

I teach classes 28 weeks of the year, but the rest of the time I do research and write books.

Disgust is intuitive microbiology