You can be honest without sharing your opinions on everything.

I'd rather have a kid come up to me and tell me that he loves dinosaurs or he loves airplanes or he likes training dogs or I like Shakespeare. I mean, just something.

You simply cannot tell other people they are stupid, even if they really are stupid.

If language naturally evolves to serve the needs of tiny rodents with tiny rodent brains, then what's unique about language isn't the brilliant humans who invented it to communicate high-level abstract thoughts. What's unique about language is that the creatures who develop it are highly vulnerable to being eaten.

Curiosity is the other side of caution.

Mild autism can give you a genius like Einstein. If you have severe autism, you could remain nonverbal. You don't want people to be on the severe end of the spectrum. But if you got rid of all the autism genetics, you wouldn't have science or art. All you would have is a bunch of social 'yak yaks.'

Whereas an elephant that was scared to death that diesel powered equipment, equipment that ran on a gas engine, was just fine. Because somebody had attacked it with construction equipment. But if it had a diesel engine, it was bad.