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 trouble with conspiracies, even those that are to everybody's advantage in the long run, is that they are open to abuse. If manipulators really had the powers claimed, they could win the lottery every week. I prefer to point out that they could also win a Nobel Prize for discovering fundamental physical forces hitherto unknown to science.

The messages that DNA molecules contain are all but eternal when seen against the time scale of individual lifetimes. The lifetimes of DNA messages give or take a few mutations are measured in units ranging from millions of years to hundreds of millions of years; or, in other words, ranging from 10,000 individual lifetimes to a trillion individual lifetimes. Each individual organism should be seen as a temporary vehicle, in which DNA messages spend a tiny fraction of their geological lifetimes.

The body is a survival machine programmed to propagate the genes that reside inside it.

The assignment of purpose to everything is called teleology. Children are native teleologists, and many never grow out of it.

More poignant for us, at Laetoli in Tanzania are the companionable footprints of three real hominids, probably Australopithecus afarensis, walking together 3.6 million years ago in what was then fresh volcanic ash. Who does not wonder what these individuals were to each other, whether they held hands or even talked, and what forgotten errand they shared in a Pliocene dawn?

If you are in the camp I am, one place where science and faith could touch each other is in the investigation of supposedly miraculous events.