For the planet's sake, I hope we have bird flu or some other thing that will reduce the population, because otherwise we're doomed.

The sale of sex in modern societies is not about spreading genes. Sex has been taken over by the memes.

Finally, we might decide that civilisation itself is worth preserving. In that case we have to work out what to save and which people would be needed in a drastically reduced population - weighing the value of scientists and musicians against that of politicians, for example...

In proportion to our body mass, our brain is three times as large as that of our nearest relatives. This huge organ is dangerous and painful to give birth to, expensive to build and, in a resting human, uses about 20 per cent of the body's energy even though it is just 2 per cent of the body's weight. There must be some reason for all this evolutionary expense.

Science has, after all, made some colossal blunders in the past... Our current materialism and its rejection of the idea of a spirit or soul might be just another great falsity.

One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they think about memes is they try to extend on the analogy with genes. That's not how it works. It works by realizing the concept of a replicator.

Just as the design of our bodies can be understood only in terms of natural selection, so the design of our minds can be understood only in terms of memetic selection.