I might respect you as a brilliant intellect, runner, musician or juggler. But respect your BELIEFS? Only if they're supported by evidence.

Have they discovered evolution yet?

It is all too easy to mistake passion that can change its mind for fundamentalism, which never will.

There's an element of paradox there - that at least you know where you stand with the fundamentalists. I mean, they're absolutely clear in their error and their stupidity, and so you can really go after them.

Reductionism is a dirty word, and a kind of 'holistier than thou' self-righteousness has become fashionable.

Suppose that there's a gene that makes you gay if you were bottle-fed but that has some completely different effect if you were breast-fed. So in the days before bottles were invented that gene would not have manifested itself as gay behavior, but now that bottles are common it can do so.

And the beauty of the anthropic principle is that it tells us, against all intuition, that a chemical model need only predict that life will arise on one planet in a billion billion to give us a good and entirely satisfying explanation for the presence of life here.