Saddam Hussein's mind would have been a unique resource for historical, political and psychological research: a resource that is now forever unavailable to scholars... In a small way his execution represents a wanton and vandalistic destruction of important research data.

Why, I can't help wondering, is God thought to need such ferocious defence? One might have supposed him amply capable of looking after himself.

There is no such thing as a Christian child: only a child of Christian parents.

I think from my point of view - I won't say it doesn't matter whether [Darwinian explanations] are right or wrong, it's just sufficient in some cases, for me, to be able to say, Well, at least it's not totally implausible from a Darwinian point of view.

They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.

The world and the universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more we understand about it the more beautiful does it appear.

Leaders who forbid their followers to use effective contraceptive methods express a preference for "natural" methods of population limitation, and a natural method is exactly what they are going to get. It is called starvation.