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.
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.
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.