Accepting evolution does not force us to jettison our morals and ethics, and rejecting evolution does not ensure their constancy.

Remember always that we are pattern-seeking primates who are especially adept at finding patterns with emotional meaning.

What can be more soul shaking than peering through a 100-inch telescope at a distant galaxy, holding a 100-million-year-old fossil or a 500,000-year-old stone tool in one's hand, standing before the immense chasm of space and time that is the Grand Canyon, or listening to a scientist who gazed upon the face of the universe's creation and did not blink?

We are a fluke of nature, a quirk of evolution, a glorious contingency.

My thesis is that morality exists outside the human mind in the sense of being not just a trait of individual humans, but a human trait; that is, a human universal.

Machine intelligence of a human nature could be a century away, and immortality is at least a millennium away, if not unattainable altogether.

As Karl Marx once noted: 'Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.' William Jennings Bryan and the Scopes trial was a tragedy. The creationists and intelligent design theorists are a farce.