“I have often noticed how primate groups in their entirety enter a simi...” — Frans de Waal Quote

I have often noticed how primate groups in their entirety enter a similar mood. All of a sudden, all of them are playful, hopping around. Or all of them are grumpy. Or all of them are sleepy and settle down. In such cases, the mood contagion serves the function of synchronizing activities.

Unlike the primate hand, the elephant's grasping organ is also its nose. Elephants use their trunks not only to reach food but also to sniff and touch it. With their unparalleled sense of smell, the animals know exactly what they are going for. Vision is secondary.

It is hard to get animals which normally pay little attention to each other to do things together. One can teach dolphins to jump simultaneously out of the water precisely because they show similar behavior spontaneously, but try to make two domestic cats jump together and you will fail.

Religion may have become a codification of morality, and it may fortify it, but it's not the origin of it.

Research and development activities to support Yucca are permitted. This will ensure that we keep Congress in the driver's seat for nuclear waste policy.

My mom has always said that you have to do other things besides going to school, other extracurricular activities, so she made me do everything from basketball to, well, you name it. But for some reason, dance was the thing I always wanted to go and do.

The Amazon is not just a set of trees. It is a set of 25 million people. If we don't create real economic opportunities for them, the practical result is to encourage disorganized economic activities that results in the further destruction of the rain forest.

People are leaving trails everywhere they go; automated web crawlers tell you an awful lot about their social activities. The flow of information in fundamentally unobtrusive ways into social control organisations has risen dramatically.