But, however many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead, or rather not alive.
The thing that defines a species is that all members have the same addressing system for their DNA.
DNA is ROM. It can be read millions of times over, but only written to once – when it is first assembled the birth of the cell in which it resides.
If you look up at the Milky Way through the eyes of Carl Sagan, you get a feeling in your chest of something greater than yourself. And it is. But it’s not supernatural.
It doesn’t hurt my feeling when I get vilified by fundamentalist religious people. I’ve actually made comedy out of it. I’ve made light of that.
I get the feeling more and more that religion is being left behind.
If your plane is being hijacked by an armed man who, though prepared to take risks, presumably wants to go on living, there is room for bargaining.
If we are too friendly to nice, decent bishops, we run the risk of buying into the fiction that there’s something virtuous about believing things because of faith rather than because of evidence. We run the risk of betraying scientific enlightenment.
All qualified physicists, biologists, cosmologists and geologists agree, on the basis of massive, mutually corroborating evidence, that the earth’s age is at least four billion years.
A gene might be able to assist replicas of itself that are sitting in other bodies. If so, this would appear as individual altruism but it would be brought about by gene selfishness.
Reductionism is a dirty word, and a kind of ‘holistier than thou’ self-righteousness has become fashionable.
It is possible in medicine, even when you intend to do good, to do harm instead. That is why science thrives on actively encouraging criticism rather than stifling it.
We’ve all been brought up with the view that religion has some kind of special privileged status. You’re not allowed to criticise it.
The body is a survival machine programmed to propagate the genes that reside inside it.
Let our tribute to the dead be a new resolve: to respect people for what they individually think, rather than respect groups for what they were collectively brought up to believe.
We are digital archives of the African Pliocene, even of Devonian seas; walking repositories of wisdom out of the old days. You could spend a lifetime reading in this ancient library and die unsated by the wonder of it.
I’m not much given to straight, irony-free hero-worship.
The Universe does not owe us meaning.
I think what attracts me about the Electric Monk is that it’s such an eloquent example of the futility of belief for belief’s sake. I mean there’s only any point in believing something if it’s true.
I mean, in a way, I feel that one of the reasons for learning about Darwinian evolution is as an object lesson in how not to set up our values and social lives.