It is not so much that we, using our brains, spin our yarns, as that our brains, using yarns, spin us.

Human freedom is not an illusion; it is an objective phenomenon, distinct from all other biological conditions and found in only one species - us.

Now that mobile phones and the internet have altered the epistemic selective landscape in a revolutionary way, every religious organisation must scramble to evolve defences or become extinct.

The secret of happiness is: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.

It's this expandable capacity to represent reasons that we have that gives us a soul. But what's it made of? It's made of neurons. It's made of lots of tiny robots. And we can actually explain the structure and operation of that kind of soul, whereas an eternal, immortal, immaterial soul is just a metaphysical rug under which you sweep your embarrassment for not having any explanation.

In 50 years - or 20 years, or 200 years - our current epistemic horizon (the Big Bang, roughly) may look as parochial as the horizon Newton had to settle for in his day, but no doubt there will still be good questions whose answers elude us.

The evidence for evolution pours in, not only from geology, paleontology, biogeography, and anatomy, but of course from molecular biology and every other branch of the life sciences.