But here I stop-short of any deterministic speculation that attributes specific behaviors to the possession of specific altruist or opportunist genes. Our genetic makeup permits a wide range of behaviors-from Ebenezer Scrooge before to Ebenezer Scrooge after. I do not believe that the miser hoards through opportunist genes or that the philanthropist gives because nature endowed him with more than the normal complement of altruist genes. Upbringing, culture, class, status, and all the intangibles that we call 'free will,' determine how we restrict our behaviors from the wide spectrum-extreme altruism to extreme selfishness-that our genes permit.

For Linnaeus, Homo sapiens was both special and not special. [:] Special and not special have come to mean nonbiological and biological, or nurture and nature.…

If you defend a behavior by arguing that people are programmed directly for it, then how do you continue to defend it if your speculation is wrong, for the beh…

I do not claim that intelligence, however defined, has no genetic basis-I regard it as trivially true, uninteresting, and unimportant that it does. The express…

The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed biologically given human nature, but result from the social process whi…

When Marilyn Monroe got out of the game, I wrote something like, 'Southern California's special horror notwithstanding, if the world offered nothing, nowhere t…

For some of us it now embodies a mildly prurient voyeurism, but those who stay tuned claim it offers real insights into people's lives.