Language builds on our cognitive capacities to reason about the goals and intentions of other people, on our desire to imitate, our desire to communi… - Gary F. Marcus

More broadly, formal logic of the sort we have been talking about does only one thing well: it allows us to take knowledge of which we are certain and apply rules that are always valid to deduce new knowledge of which we are also certain.

One key lesson learned from mapping the genome is that access to a rough initial map proved crucial to developing more detailed maps of small individual human differences.

Dino-DNA injected into frog eggs would likely yield something different from dino-DNA in dinosaur eggs-because the micro-environment of the egg would inevitably influence which genetic cascades were expressed. (Fans of the environment shouldn't get too comfortable, either-implanting a frog's DNA into a dinosaur egg would be even less likely to yield a dinosaur.) Because the recipes that build the mind and brain are always sensitive to the environment, there is no guarantee that those recipes will converge on any particular outcome, and there will never be an easy answer to our questions about nature and nurture.