Q: "Earlier in the talk, you made the point that agents e.g. proteins, organisms, have been studied independent of their environments, and environmental factors have traditionally been explained and regressed out. Why do you think that the past century of biologists have largely tried to explain away environments, and have not engaged the idea that agents and environments must be examined together to better understand biological systems of study?"

A: “As people, there’s a notion that somehow we’re going to come up with some kind of rosetta stone that is going to unlock our ability to make ourselves better. Or that can explain why I'm sitting in this chair and not someone else in my neighborhood. Why certain kind of kids should go to this school, and some at that school, and I think we want some kind of simple answer for all the things that happen with human beings, and weave lyrics to be that thing, and I think when you introduce the notion that whatever is in my genome, right-- that explains my ability to sit in front of you all and talk is not the right explanation as to why I'm sitting here and my mother wasn't able to get here, people don’t like that--they don’t like that it’s probably more something to do with our environments. Once the environment is introduced you make the world a lot more complicated, and you have to answer for the things that you do. The people that have to answer for the way society is-- those people don't want to do that. People want simple explanations, they want to be able to go home at night, and I want to be able to go home at night, and say I'm just so smart or whatever instead of saying I'm here because of opportunities and environments. That's a much more uncomfortable thing to understand, and I think that's one of the reasons why we continue to harp on this type of information, so you want to study the thing that's easy to study, you want to get to the fundamental rules that we can finish. Because equations are beautiful, and they allow us to describe these things in really important ways, and I understand that, I like equations, you just saw that. I think that makes sense, but I think the more cynical view is also correct. I think in concert, these things have kind of confused our field, frankly, and they distracted us from getting after the actual answers which do exist, if we just open up our minds and be a little more comprehensive. That's really interesting.”