Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.

The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous.

I've written a number of books that have to do with the evolution of humans, human intelligence, human emotions.

We hunger to understand, so we invent myths about how we imagine the world is constructed - and they're, of course, based upon what we know, which is ourselves and other animals. So we make up stories about how the world was hatched from a cosmic egg or created after the mating of cosmic deities or by some fiat of a powerful being.

We can celebrate how far we've come from our sexist past when women and men are equally represented in the pages of science fiction anthologies.

There must be right and wrong answers to questions of morality and values that potentially fall within the purview of science. On this view, some people and cultures will be right (to a greater or lesser degree), and some will be wrong, with respect to what they deem important in life.

The child, merely by going on with his life, learns to speak the language belonging to his race. It is like a mental chemistry that takes place in the child.

My feeling is that science is virtually an unexplored ground. It's very visible - more so all the time - but there's no fiction that tells us how scientists think, and they really don't think the way that other people do.