I think more than 20 percent of Nobel Prizes have been won by Jews.

If there is something that appears to lie beyond the natural world as it is now imperfectly understood, we hope to eventually understand it and embrace it within the natural. As ever when we unweave a rainbow, it will not become less wonderful.

The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has shown great courage, in the face of spiteful vested interests, in demonstrating how easy it is for people to concoct memories that are entirely false but which seem, to the victim, every bit as real as true memories.

I became a little alarmed at the number of my readers who took the meme more positively as a theory of human culture in its own right - either to criticize it (unfairly, given my original modest intention) or to carry it far beyond the limits of what I then thought justified. This was why I may have seemed to backtrack.

Do those people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration to moral rectitude have the slightest notion of what is actually written in it?

Any altruistic system is inherently unstable, because it is open to abuse by selfish individuals, ready to exploit it.

The river of my title is a river of DNA, a river of information, not a river of bones and tissues