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" The way to understand how different species evolved is to think about the niches that they fill in an ecosystem - basically, how they make a living. "

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" You wouldn't believe the kind of hate mail I get about my work on irregular verbs. "

" Evolutionary psychologists seem to want to unmask our noblest motives as ultimately self-interested - to show that our love for children, compassion for the unfortunate and sense of justice are just tactics in a Darwinian struggle to perpetuate our genes. "

" Evolution is an indispensable component of any satisfying explanation of our psychology. "

" The stirrings of morality emerge early in childhood. Toddlers spontaneously offer toys and help to others and try to comfort people they see in distress. "

" The brain is not a bag of traits. It's startlingly complex. There are few or no single genes with a consistent effect on the mind. "

" Northeastern and most coastal states will vote for the candidate who is more closely aligned with international cooperation and engagement, secularism and science, gun control, individual freedom in culture and sexuality, and a greater role for the government in protecting the environment and ensuring economic equality. "

" No one knows what the nongenetic causes of individuality are. Perhaps people are shaped by modifications of genes that take place after conception, or by haphazard fluctuations in the chemical soup in the womb or the wiring up of the brain or the expression of the genes themselves. "

" I spent 20 years doing research on regular and irregular verbs, not because I'm an obsessive language lover but because it seemed to me that they tapped into a fundamental distinction in language processing, indeed in cognitive processing, between memory lookup and rule-driven computation. "

" People know there is a difference between what you do and what you accept. There is a difference between me knowing that people swear, me hearing people swear and me swearing, and everyone accepting that this is something you can do as much as you like. "

" Today we take it for granted that war happens in smaller, poorer and more backward countries. "

" Language mavens commonly confuse their own peeves with a worsening of the language. "

" So no, it's not all in the genes, but what isn't in the genes isn't in the family environment either. It can't be explained in terms of the overall personalities or the child-rearing practices of parents. "

" When people talk, they lay lines on each other, do a lot of role playing, sidestep, shilly-shally and engage in all manner of vagueness and innuendo. We do this and expect others to do it, yet at the same time we profess to long for the plain truth, for people to say what they mean, simple as that. Such hypocrisy is a human universal. "

" One of the things that people complain about is loneliness, disconnectedness. If you live in a society where your life is rarely threatened and most of your relationships are more on an economic exchange basis, then this could leave people feeling less connected. "

" The 9/11 strikes left an indelible impact on our minds, but in relative terms, the scale of casualties actually wasn't all that high. "

" Photography is a demanding action sport. The light can change so quickly. I often find myself sprinting so that I can catch the perfect light falling on a photogenic subject. "

" If anything, Powerpoint, if used well, would ideally reflect the way we think. "

" We can make fun of hockey fans, but someone who enjoys Homer is indulging the same kind of vicarious bloodlust. "

" My opinions about human nature are shared by many psychologists, linguists, and biologists, not to mention philosophers and scholars going back centuries. "

" I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture. "

" An enormous amount of scientific language is metaphorical. We talk about a genetic code, where code originally meant a cipher; we talk about the solar system model of the atom as though the atom were like a sun and moon and planets. "

" Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else's thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person's vantage point. "

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

" You have to remember that not every creature that was evolving left behind its skull or its tools for our convenience tens of thousands of years later. Most bones or most tools rot or get buried and are never found again. "

" The rules of friendship are tacit, unconscious; they are not rational. In business, though, you have to think rationally. "

" Technology, ideology, and social and cultural changes periodically throw out new forms of violence for humanity to contend with. "

" If the myth of pure evil is that evil is committed with the intention of causing harm and an absence of moral considerations, then it applies to very few acts of so-called 'pure evil' because most evildoers believe what they are doing is forgivable or justifiable. "

" Everyone's pedigree merges into everyone else's pedigree. So if you go back far enough, everyone is related. "

" Like the early days of the Internet, the dawn of personal genomics promises benefits and pitfalls that no one can foresee. "

" We're living in primate heaven. We're warm, dry, we're not hungry, we don't have fleas and ticks and infections. So why are we so miserable? "