You and I probably wouldn't be here if our ancestors hadn't been greedy savages.

There are many humorous things in the world; among them, the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages.

We owe our big brains less to inventiveness than to conflicts of interest among social minds engaged in an arms race to be the best at manipulating others.

Humans like to think of themselves as unusual. We've got big brains that make it possible for us to think, and we think that we have free will and that our behavior can't be described by some mechanistic set of theorems or ideas. But even in terms of much of our behavior, we really aren't very different from other animals.

Human cultural diversity is vast; the range of cultural practices, beliefs, and languages that we speak is vast.

Natural selection has duped us with an emotion that encourages group thinking. It is an emotion that makes us act as if for the good of the group; an emotion that brings pleasure, pride, or even thrills from coordinated group activity.