‎Using his burgeoning intelligence, this most successful of all mammals has exploited the environment to produce food for an ever increasing population. Instead of controlling the environment for the benefit of the population, perhaps it's time we controlled the population to allow the survival of the environment.

The most extraordinary thing about trying to piece together the missing links in the evolutionary story is that when you do find a missing link and put it in the story, you suddenly need all these other missing links to connect to the new discovery. The gaps and questions actually increase - it's extraordinary.

I just wish the world was twice as big and half of it was still unexplored.

I suspect that happiness is not a state but rather a transition.

The correct scientific response to something that is not understood must always be to look harder for the explanation, not give up and assume a supernatural cause.

I often get letters, quite frequently, from people who say how they like the programmes a lot, but I never give credit to the almighty power that created nature.

If we and the rest of the back-boned animals were to disappear overnight, the rest of the world would get on pretty well. But if the invertebrates were to disappear, the world's ecosystems would collapse