If saying that religion should be a private matter and should not have special influence in public life is illiberal, then 74% of U.K. Christians are illiberal, too.

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.

The machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like. Apart from differences in jargon, the pages of a molecular biology journal might be interchanged with those of a computer engineering journal.

We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.

Faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.

Steve Grand is the creator of what I think is the nearest approach to artificial life so far, and his first book, Creation: Life and How to Make It, is as interesting as you would expect. But he illuminates more than just the properties of life: his originality extends to matter itself and the very nature of reality. Not since David Deutsch's The Fabric of Reality have I encountered such a compelling invitation to think everything out afresh, from the bottom up.

Do you advocate the Ten Commandments as a guide to the good life? Then I can only presume that you don't know the Ten Commandments.