My computer is a very complex gadget and it was designed by many designers, so why must the universe have only a single designer and not many designers?

My mind is open to the most wonderful range of future possibilities, which I cannot even dream about.

Most of what we strive for in our modern life uses the apparatus of goal seeking that was originally set up to seek goals in the state of nature.

Our leaders have described the recent atrocity with the customary cliche: mindless cowardice. Mindless may be a suitable word for the vandalising of a telephone box. It is not helpful for understanding what hit New York on September 11. Those people were not mindless and they were certainly not cowards. On the contrary, they had sufficiently effective minds braced with an insane courage, and it would pay us mightily to understand where that courage came from. It came from religion.

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.

DNA is ROM. It can be read millions of times over, but only written to once - when it is first assembled the birth of the cell in which it resides.

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