It’s very likely that most mammals have consciousness, and probably birds, too.
At the deepest level, all living things that have ever been looked at have the same DNA code. And many of the same genes.
If ever there was a slamming of the door in the face of constructive investigation, it is the word miracle. To a medieval peasant, a radio would have seemed like a miracle.
I suppose if you look back to your early childhood you accept everything people tell you, and that includes a heavy dose of irrationality – you’re told about tooth fairies and Father Christmas and things.
I accept that there may be things far grander and more incomprehensible than we can possibly imagine.
I once wrote that anybody who believes the world is only 6,000 years old is either ignorant, stupid, insane or wicked.
I am one of those scientists who feels that it is no longer enough just to get on and do science. We have to devote a significant proportion of our time and resources to defending it from deliberate attack from organised ignorance.
We humans are an extremely important manifestation of the replication bomb, because it is through us – through our brains, our symbolic culture and our technology – that the explosion may proceed to the next stage and reverberate through deep space.
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things.
We are a very, very unusual species.
Sometimes I think it’s possible to mistake desire for clarity and talking in a no-nonsense way for aggression.
Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence.
I don’t know what to think about magic and fairy tales.
Metaphors are fine if they aid understanding, but sometimes they get in the way.
When I am dying, I should like my life taken out under general anaesthetic, exactly as if it were a diseased appendix.
Why would an all-powerful creator decide to plant his carefully crafted species on islands and continents in exactly the appropriate pattern to suggest, irresistibly, that they had evolved and dispersed from the site of their evolution?
If the history-deniers who doubt the fact of evolution are ignorant of biology, those who think the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worst than ignorant, they are the deluded to the point of perversity.
Evolution is not a genetically controlled distortion of one adult form into another; it is a genetically controlled alteration in a developmental program.
Even if it were true that evolution, or the teaching of evolution, encouraged immorality that would not imply that the theory of evolution was false.