I want to show you the rest of this photograph, because this photograph is analogous to what we do to the word "compassion" in our culture -- we clean it up and we diminish its depths and its grounding in life, which is messy.

So for instance, by measuring the genome, we've learned a lot about how we're related to other kinds of animals by the closeness of our genome, or how we're related to each other -- the family tree, or the tree of life.

One other thing you can do with such a thing is you can, because it's a pattern matching exercise, because there's unique fingerprint, we can actually scan through the entire genome and find other proteins that show a similar fingerprint.

It can cross the barriers of time, past, present and future, and allow us to experience the similarities between ourselves and through others, real and imagined.

(Applause) Just to emphasize how weird and counterintuitive this is: this material and others like it will get colder when we take them out of the shade, even though the sun is shining on it.

Amy O'Toole: Thank you, Beau. We thought that it was easy to see the link between humans and apes in the way that we think, because we look alike.

But we wondered if there's a possible link with other animals. It'd be amazing if humans and bees thought similar, since they seem so different from us.

More recently, if you've been following the Kenyan press — (Laughter) (Applause) (Cheers) — these are the attributes that they associated the Kenyan MPs with. But I want to challenge that.

It has a very large, thick atmosphere, and in fact, its surface environment was believed to be more like the environment we have here on the Earth, or at least had in the past, than any other body in the solar system.

Because when we mix them, we can get a voice that's as clear as our surrogate talker -- that's the person we borrowed the filter from— and is similar in identity to our target talker.

So we're extremely closely related to them, and as you'll see in terms of our behavior, we've got some relationship as well.

We went to Harvard and we checked almost every department, and in fact, from Harvard Business School, where a few people wanted the wealthy to have more and the [poor] to have less, the similarity was astonishing.

I use planet Earth to go in very extreme environments where conditions were similar to those of Mars at the time when the climate changed, and there I'm trying to understand what happened.

And coincidentally or not, I just find this particular comparison between the smallest scale of knowledge -- the brain -- and the largest scale of knowledge -- the universe itself -- to be really quite striking and fascinating.

And I think that it suggests that life could evolve many different ways, maybe similar to us with other types of DNA, maybe things without DNA at all.

And they will have been helpful to add time to our memory and they will help differentiate very similar memories, like: how do you find your bike that you park at the station every day in the same area, but in a slightly different position?

Because if life originated twice within this one Solar System, it means it was easy, and given similar conditions elsewhere, life will happen.

This was an awesome thing to find, but here's the secret: for the last 60 years, most of the antibiotics on the market have come from similar soil bacteria.

Now -- the story might seem to good to be true, but when you administer batteries of psychological tests, you get the same results -- namely, identical twins separated at birth show quite astonishing similarities.

A lot of these things -- or similar -- would have happened some time, probably a decade later. I didn't realize at the time I was doing inquiry-based, hands-on things with teams, like they're trying to get in education systems.

I mean, is there anything that is not visualizing what can't be seen, in terms of discovering this dinosaur bone from a small piece of it that's out there, or seeing the distortion that we try to see as evolutionary distortion in one animal to another?

There're 102 known variants of the common cold, and there're only 102 because people got bored collecting them: there are just new ones every year.

It mimics what we now understand about reconstructing the 1918 flu virus, the last great pandemic, in that it also jumped directly from birds to people.

It's similar to social media's amplification effect, like when you look at something that bothers you, you tend to stick with like-minded people and exchange messages and memes, and you become even more angry.

Today, IQ tests employ many similar design elements and types of questions as the early tests, though we have better techniques for identifying potential bias in the test.

In the 20th century, drug companies created a slew of synthetic substances similar to these opiates, including heroin, hydrocodone, oxycodone, and fentanyl.

With these conditions, the body’s immune system attacks its own cells, a process analogous to a constant asthma attack or rash.

So, very interesting parallels between the biological and the engineering worlds. And interestingly, this turns out -- the stomatopod saddle turns out to be the first described biological hyperbolic paraboloid spring.

And what you can do now is, you can outlay exactly what your chromosome is, and what the gene code on that chromosome is right here, and what those genes code for, and what animals they code against, and then you can tie it to the literature.

As I learned more about Reproductive Justice at Women With A Vision, and as I continued to be active in the Movement for Black Lives, I found myself wanting others to see and feel these similarities.