The irrationality of disgust suggests it is unreliable as a source of moral insight. There may be good arguments against gay marriage, partial-birth abortions and human cloning, but the fact that some people find such acts to be disgusting should carry no weight.

Some scholars argue that although the brain might contain neural subsystems, or modules, specialized for tasks like recognizing faces and understanding language, it also contains a part that constitutes a person, a self: the chief executive of all the subsystems.

Morality is often seen as an innovation, like agriculture and writing. From this perspective, babies are pint-sized psychopaths, self-interested beings who need to be taught moral notions such as the wrongness of harming another person.

Part of the satisfaction of tattling surely comes from showing oneself to adults as a good moral agent, a responsible being who is sensitive to right and wrong. But I would bet that children would tattle even if they could do so only anonymously. They would do it just to have justice done.

I think that I got committed to physics at the age of - oh, it must have been 1942 - ten, when most countries were at war and children were interested in airplanes and bombs and such things.

Until politics are a branch of science we shall do well to regard political and social reforms as experiments rather than short-cuts to the millennium.

Chemistry is really about two people who like to act together, I think. It's like tennis in the most cliched way. It's like if you hit the ball, they hit the ball back, and they don't hit it into the stands, and they don't put the ball in their pocket and walk off - and they don't argue with the umpire, you know?

If Trump publicly commits to embrace science, stops threatening censorship of the Internet, rejects fake news and denounces hate against our diverse employees, only then it would make sense for tech leaders to visit Trump Tower.