I respect you too much to respect your ridiculous ideas.

To me, the right approach is to say we are profoundly ignorant of these matters. We need to work on them. But to suddenly say the answer is God - it's that that seems to me to close off the discussion.

The machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like. Apart from differences in jargon, the pages of a molecular biology journal might be interchanged with those of a computer engineering journal.

If you don't know anything about computers, just remember that they are machines that do exactly what you tell them but often surprise you in the result.

For centuries the most powerful argument for God's existence from the physical world was the so-called argument from design: Living things are so beautiful and elegant and so apparently purposeful, they could only have been made by an intelligent designer. But [Charles] Darwin provided a simpler explanation. His way is a gradual, incremental improvement starting from very simple beginnings and working up step by tiny incremental step to more complexity, more elegance, more adaptive perfection.

In Britain you don't usually learn about evolution until you are about 15. I should have thought that you should start at about 8. But I could be wrong about that.

We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. 'Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene'. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to 'memory', or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with 'cream'.