For truth be told, I was tormented by perceptions and their corollary temptation which from a social definition rendered me unsane, though from a mor… - Norman Spinrad

Here, in the company of the mindless trees, the free-flying birds, the bugs and frogs that passed from stimulus directly to response without the interval of consciousness between, did I hope to lose myself in the living mandala of evolution’s less self-tortured forms.

"Genius such as yours is a genetic gift."
"So I have heard from my parents."

Thus human culture has been as much a product of the process of natural selection as the human species. We are not merely clockwork oranges, the clockwork itself, the social programming which determines our “repertoires of behavior,” how we respond to the world around us, is itself the product of a blind deterministic process.