If a healing technique is demonstrated to have curative properties in properly controlled double-blind trials, it ceases to be alternative. It simply, as Diamond explains, becomes medicine.
Molecular evidense suggests that our common ancestor with the chimpanzees lived, in Africa, between 5 and 7 million years ago, say half a million generations ago. This is not long by evolutionary standards.
I am an enthusiastic Darwinian, but I think Darwinism is too big a theory to be confined to the narrow context of the gene.
Physicists are working on the Big Bang, and one day they may or may not solve it.
I didn’t have a very starry school career, I was medium to above average, nothing special.
My decision to be a scientist was a bit of a drift really, more or less by default.
I do disapprove very strongly of labelling children, especially young children, as something like ‘Catholic children’ or ‘Protestant children’ or ‘Islamic children.’
I have often said that I am a passionate Darwinian when it comes to explaining why we exist.
I was confirmed at my prep school at the age of 13.
Of course in science there are things that are open to doubt and things need to be discussed. But among the things that science does know, evolution is about as certain as anything we know.
Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is explained by a designer but that’s because the designer himself, the engineer, is explained by natural selection.
Things exist either because they have recently come into existence or because they have qualities that made them unlikely to be destroyed in the past.
It has been convincingly demonstrated that countries where there are high rates of poverty, or high rates of economic inequality, are the countries with the highest rates of religious beliefs.
Do you really mean the only reason you try to be good is to gain God’s approval and reward? That’s not morality, that’s just sucking up.
The deceitful misquoting of scientists to suit an anti-scientific agenda ranks among the many unchristian habits of fundamentalist authors.
What is interesting about the scientific world view is that it is true, inspiring, remarkable and that it unites a whole lot of phenomena under a single heading.
Don’t ask God to cure cancer and world poverty. He’s too busy finding you a parking space and fixing the weather for your barbecue.
I hate the neologism “owned” for “scored a victory over”. I have no intention of owning anyone, and nobody will ever own me.
There are people in the world who desperately want not to have to believe in Darwinism .
Evolution normally does not come to a halt, but constantly ‘tracks’ the changing environment.