A geneticist is a geek who claims to have proven through regression analyses that a Neanderthal had sex with your great-grandmother 50,000 years ago.

After a handful of geeks sequenced the Neanderthal genome and found a 2% match, they opened the flood gates to hundreds of geneticists that now make a living telling you what diseases you inherited from an extinct Arctic ape.

if it’s within your power to give another person great joy at little or no expense to yourself— or even at great expense— then you should, especially when you love that person.

I didn’t like how my body seemed to be intent on sabotaging my brain, especially since my brain was so good at sabotaging itself.

Elizabeth called it my mane of hair; I called it my bane of hair. However, it was far worse looking when it was short, sticking straight up or out at awkward angles; at least when it was long it almost obeyed gravity.

I suggest that the type of consciousness – not merely the degree of intelligence – that Neanderthals possessed was different in important respects from that of Upper Palaeolithic people, and that this distinction precluded, for the Neanderthals, both image-making and elaborate burial.