We are placed in the genus of Homo, which is Latin for man - Homo sapiens: supposedly wise men. I sometimes think - wonder - whether we really are wise men.

What makes us human depends on what place on our evolutionary path we're talking about. If you go back six million years ago, what makes us human is that we were walking upright. That's all. If you go to 2.6 million years ago, it's the fact that we're designing and making stone tools.

This was the most important discovery I had ever made in my life. It was a discovery which has irrevocably changed my whole life's direction. It immediately elevated me to the status of one of the world's leading anthropologists.

In our case, finding a Lucy is unique. No one will ever find another Lucy. You can't order one from a biological supply house. It's a unique discovery, a unique specimen.

Though Hillary Rodham married Bill Clinton 11 years after Camille Hanks married Bill Cosby, and after having earned her own law degree, the terms of her marriage were also shaped in their own way by a presumption of a husband's centrality and a wife's subsidiary nature.

Marriage is an institution fits in perfect harmony with the laws of nature; whereas systems of slavery and segregation were designed to brutally oppress people and thereby violated the laws of nature.

Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.

We are going to see a steady stream, I predict, of Nobel prizes coming out of chemistry and given to women.