The solution, as all thoughtful people recognize, must lie in properly melding the themes of inborn predisposition and shaping through life's experiences. This fruitful joining cannot take the false form of percentages adding to 100-as in 'intelligence is 80 percent nature and 20 percent nurture,' or 'homosexuality is 50 percent inborn and 50 percent learned,' and a hundred other harmful statements in this foolish format. When two ends of such a spectrum are commingled, the result is not a separable amalgam (like shuffling two decks of cards with different backs), but an entirely new and higher entity that cannot be decomposed (just as adults cannot be separated into maternal and paternal contributions to their totality).

We debase the richness of both nature and our own minds if we view the great pageant of our intellectual history as a compendium of new information leading fro…

I have long recognized the theory and aesthetic of such comprehensive display: show everything and incite wonder by sheer variety. But I had never realized how…

Great thinkers build their edifices with subtle consistency. We do our intellectual forebears an enormous disservice when we dismember their visions and scan t…

But here I stop-short of any deterministic speculation that attributes specific behaviors to the possession of specific altruist or opportunist genes. Our gene…

'Life consists not simply in what heredity and environment do to us but in what we make out of what they do to us.'

But I'll tell you this. Where's this idea that childbirth is a miracle come from? I missed that fucking meeting, okay. 'It's a miracle. Childbirth is a miracle…