Sam Kean Quotes

Well, it arose out of two long-term concerns - the first being the possibility of genetic manipulation, nature versus nurture, what constitutes how people get to be how they are.

Genes can't possibly explain all of what makes us what we are.

One of the things about genetics that has become clearer as we've done genomes - as we've worked our way through the evolutionary tree, including humans - is that we're probably much more genetic animals than we want to confess we are.

Walking around sometimes, I would love to just be able to watch people, see how they act. Sometimes I would love to be invisible.

But with each passing year and each new study, the evidence for the genetic contribution to individual and group differences becomes more firmly established than ever.

We are somehow natured, not just to reproduce, but for sociality and even for culture.

Man is the control experiment of heredity and environment; and since his heredity controls him, he tries to control his environment.

Too much society makes a man frivolous; too little, a savage.

You learn a lot about human nature in a bar.

One thing that I've noticed about big families is that they usually break down into two camps: the talkers and the watchers.

Culture is an output of a bunch of inputs that have to come together the right way. Specifically, it is the collision of people and their context, how they interact with each other in that context, and then how that context evolves based on those interactions as they multiply.

But I think 'Love, Actually' has a very realistic view of human nature in line with the latest scientific evidence. The opening scene, where Hugh Grant's character talks about the arrivals gate at Heathrow, is about friendship and connection, it's about who we really are as a species.

I think you can tell a lot about people if you observe them as they're observing.

As a species, the look of another of our species into our eyes has a great power. It can mean a lot of different things: aggression, love.

Because I am fascinated by people and what makes them behave the way they do. I think it is one of the most fascinating things in the world.

There isn't much doubt that like other animal societies, those of Homo sapiens involved plenty of cooperation, which might have been considerably enhanced, one would suppose, by the emergence of the remarkable instrument of language.

With skin, I really believe it has a lot to do with your genes. And I've been really lucky.

I wish I loved the Human Race; I wish I loved its silly face; I wish I liked the way it walks; I wish I liked the way it talks; And when I'm introduced to one I wish I thought What Jolly Fun!

Everybody's strange everywhere. Most of the trick of being a social animal is pretending you're not. But who do you fool? Nobody worth talking to.

In the 40,000 year time scale we're all the same people. We're all equally primitive, give or take two or three thousand years here or a hundred years there.

It is a lovely oddity of human nature that a person is more inclined to interrupt two people in conversation than one person alone with a book.

He knows, as all the cleverest ones do, that no human being is so interesting that he can't make himself more interesting still by acting retarded at random intervals.

Race is precisely of as much consequence in man as it is in any animal.

Many species reciprocate, but only humans gossip, and much of what we gossip about is the vale of other people as partners for reciprocal relationships.

With my background and genetic makeup,buddy, you're lucky I'm as normal as I am. (Katra Agrotera)