Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distance target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection, although human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.

The true scientific understanding of the nature of existence is so utterly fascinating; how could you not want people to share it? Carl Sagan, I think, said 'when you're in love, you want to tell the world.' And who, on understanding a scientific view of reality, would not, as it were, fall in love and want to tell the world.

Whenever conditions arise in which a new kind of replicator can make copies of itself, the new replicators will tend to take over, and start a new kind of evolution of their own. Once this new evolution begins, it will in no necessary sense be subservient to the old.

... you need more than luck to navigate successfully through a thousand sieves in succession.

You can't imagine how gratifying it is to have a reader come up to you and say, 'You changed my life.'

The argument from improbability, properly deployed, comes close to proving that God does not exist.

You can make some inferences about a man's character if you know something about the conditions in which he has survived and prospered.