You need to understand how human beings bring together their brains and enable their ideas to combine and recombine, to meet and, indeed, to mate. In other words, you need to understand how ideas have sex.

Genes are biochemical recipes written in a four-letter alphabet called DNA.

Considering the way evolution works, it should not be surprising if every man has got a Don Giovanni somewhere inside him.

The genome is a book that wrote itself, continually adding, deleting and amending over four billion years.

Life is a Sisyphean race, run ever faster toward a finish line that is merely the start of the next race

Trade is 10 times as old as farming.

Note even Jonathan Swift would dare to write a satire in which politicians argued that - in a world where species are vanishing and more than a billion people are barely able to afford to eat - it would somehow be good for the planet to clear rain-forests to grow palm oil, or give up food-crop land to grow biofuels, solely so that people could burn fuel derived from carbohydrate rather than hydrocarbons in their cars, thus driving up the price of food for the poor. Ludicrous is too weak a word for this heinous crime.