But we all recognise the primary foible of frail humanity - our propensity for embracing hope and shunning logic, our tendency to believe what we desire rather than what we observe.

Objectivity cannot be equated with mental blankness; rather, objectivity resides in recognizing your preferences and then subjecting them to especially harsh scrutiny - and also in a willingness to revise or abandon your theories when the tests fail (as they usually do).

Science is not a heartless pursuit of objective information; it is a creative human activity.

Evolution is an inference from thousands of independent sources, the only conceptual structure that can make unified sense of all this disparate information.

Sure we fit. We wouldn't be here if we didn't. But the world wasn't made for us and it will endure without us.

Science simply cannot adjudicate the issue of God's possible superintendence of nature.

Anything, even the conceptually most complex material, can be written for general audiences without any dumbing down. Of course you have to explain things carefully. This goes back to Galileo, who wrote his great books as dialogues in Italian, not as treatises in Latin. And to Darwin, who wrote The Origin of Species for general readers. I think a lot of people pick up Darwin's book and assume it must be a popular version of some technical monograph, but there is no technical monograph. That's what he wrote. So what I'm doing is part of a great humanistic tradition.