There is something wrong with using faith - belief without evidence - as a political weapon. I wouldn't say there is something similar about using science. Science - or the products of science like technology - is just a way of achieving something real, something that happens, something that works.

Very close cousins like humans and chimps have almost all their genes in common. Slightly less close cousins like humans and monkeys still have recognizably the same genes. You could carry on right on down to humans and bacteria, and you will find continuous compelling evidence for the hierarchical tree of cousinship.

I do understand people when they say that you destroy the magic of childhood if you encourage too much skeptical questioning.

Again, it is belief without evidence. In the case of Stalinism, people actually distorted science, because it was for the good of the Communist Party.

They are either people of faith who have lost their faith from reading my books, or they are people who had already lost their faith, and something about my books encouraged them to affirm that.

I'm quite a softy, yes. I have a blank spot with respect to visual art, but I have perhaps a compensating hypersensitivity to poetry and music.

I personally would go further and say that, if your morality is based, as mine is, on a desire to increase the sum of happiness and reduce suffering, the decision to deliberately give birth to a Down baby, when you have the choice to abort it early in the pregnancy, might actually be immoral from the point of view of the child’s own welfare.