I don’t think you know what it’s like to have someone head over heels in love with you. What’s the good of a… — Frederik Pohl

She described herself as happy. This diagnosis did not come from any welling up of joy inside herself. It came from the observed fact, looking at herself objectively, that whenever she decided she wanted something she always got it, and what other definition of happiness could there be?

Think of a frog as a functional machine designed to produce baby frogs. This is the Darwinian view, and is really what evolution is all about. In order to succeed, the frog has to stay alive long enough to grow up and get pregnant or get some female frog pregnant. That means it has to do two things. It has to eat. And it has to avoid being eaten.

All of them had been so tested and retested that they had acquired considerable skill in answering test questions the way the examiners wanted them answered.