The community as a whole doesn't listen patiently to critics who adopt alternative viewpoints. Although the great lesson of history is that knowledge develops through the conflict of viewpoints.

We are embedded in a biological world and related to the organisms around us.

Everyone wants a hand in the outcome, a piece of the knowledge.

In 15 years we'll have all the sequence, a list of the genes everyone has in common and those that differ among people. We know only something like a tenth of 1 percent of the sequence at the moment.

The human's place in the universe will be set in the scheme of evolution, the product of our biological inheritance.

I have the same sense of the power and virtue of knowledge that some people get from a religious background.

Biology will relate every human gene to the genes of other animals and bacteria, to this great chain of being.