The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain anymore so it eats it!

Churches have given us great treasures such as music and architecture. Whether that pays for the harm they have done is another matter.

Darwin's idea of natural selection makes people uncomfortable because it reverses the direction of tradition.

Postmodernism, the school of 'thought' that proclaimed 'There are no truths, only interpretations' has largely played itself out in absurdity, but it has left behind a generation of academics in the humanities disabled by their distrust of the very idea of truth and their disrespect for evidence, settling for 'conversations' in which nobody is wrong and nothing can be confirmed, only asserted with whatever style you can muster.

If the best the roboticists can hope for is the creation of some crude, cheesy, second-rate, artificial consciousness, they still win.

We have had plenty of atheist presidents; they just wouldn't admit it.

Some of the greatest, most revolutionary advances in science have been given their initial expression in attractively modest terms, with no fanfare.