If not in San Francisco, then where? Not Madison, Wisconsin, again, please, dear God. - Daniel Suarez

Well, for once in my life, I not only know why I’m here, at this place, I finally know why I exist. I’ve always wondered why I was so odd. What possible evolutionary purpose could a person like me serve? No kids. Focused on my own experiences... This is my purpose. This has always been the purpose of people like us. We blaze trails. We chart oceans. We push back frontiers. Without us, humanity slowly dies.

One did not accidentally graduate from top-tier schools. One strove to get in and to maintain grades once there, and to do that, one usually needed to be a master at conformity. To excel in all the accepted conventions. No, the truly different thinkers often went unnoticed.

Sexual reproduction exists solely as a means to defeat parasites. By mixing male and female genes, sex produces offspring not exactly like either the male or female—making each generation different from the last, and presenting a moving target to intruders intent on compromising this system. … Even with this variation, parasites continue to pose a threat... and parasitism evolves and moves through any system—not just living things. The less variation there is in a system, the more readily parasites will evolve to infest it...