A deep sense of love and belonging is an irreducible need of all people. We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong. When those needs are not met, we don't function as we were meant to. We break. We fall apart. We numb. We ache. We hurt others. We get sick.

We really are creatures of a violent world, biologically speaking - watching violence and learning about it is one of our cognitive drives.

A sponge is a funny animal to center a show on. At first, I drew a few natural sponges - amorphous shapes, blobs - which was the correct thing to do biologically as a marine science teacher. Then I drew a square sponge, and it looked so funny.

There is something so biologically implausible that your attitude is going to cure a disease. There's a tremendous arrogance to imagine that your mind is all that powerful.

Live your life as such a journey that it becomes a journey of an entire new way of life - a life civilized, a life humane, a life truly alive, not just biologically, but psychologically - alive in kindness, alive in love, alive in inclusion, harmony and assimilation ? or simply, alive in and as oneness.

We are all connected; To each other, biologically. To the earth, chemically. To the rest of the universe atomically.

The most beautiful as well as the most ugly inclinations of man are not part of a fixed biologically given human nature but result from the social process which creates man.

So in my freshman year at the University of Alabama learning the literature on evolution what was known about it biologically just gradually transformed me by taking me out of literalism and increasingly into a more secular scientific view of the world.

That's why I wrote this book: to show how these people can imbue us with hope. I read somewhere that when a person takes part in community action his health improves. Something happens to him or to her biologically. It's like a tonic.