Thus, because we are rapidly advancing along this non-sustainable course, the world's environmental problems will get resolved, in one way or another… - Jared Diamond

People often ask, "What is the single most important environmental/population problem facing the world today?" A flip answer would be, "The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identifying the single most important problem!"

In particular, while natural selection favors both males and females that leave many offspring, the best strategy for doing so may be different for fathers and mothers. That generates a built-in conflict between the parents, a conclusion that all too many humans don’t need scientists to reveal to them. We make jokes about the battle of the sexes, but the battle is neither a joke nor an aberrant accident of how individual fathers or mothers behave on particular occasions. It is indeed perfectly true that behavior that is in a male’s genetic interests may not necessarily be in the interests of his female co-parent, and vice versa. That cruel fact is one of the fundamental causes of human misery.

The central principle of Fritz Bauer's career was that Germans should hold judgement upon themselves. That meant prosecuting ordinary Germans, not just the leaders whom the Allies had prosecuted. [...] The Nazi defendants being prosecuted by Bauer all tended to offer the same set of excuses [...]. Bauer's response, which he formulated again and again at the trials and in public, was as follows. Those Germans whom he was prosecuting were committing crimes against humanity. The laws of the Nazi state were illegitimate. One cannot defend one's actions by saying that one was obeying those laws. There is no law that can justify a crime against humanity. Everybody must have his own sense of right and wrong and must obey it, independently of what a state government says. Anyone who takes part in what Bauer called a murder machine [...] thereby becomes guilty of a crime.