I have begun several projects which were never completed, not necessarily because they failed, but because I got interested in other things.

We are a very, very unusual species.

It's a difficult business, finding out what's true about the world, the universe.

There are people who try to get atheists to form a sort of atheist church and have atheist community singsongs and things. I don't see the need for that, but if people want to do it, why shouldn't they?

If there are other worlds elsewhere in the universe, I would conjecture they are governed by the same laws of natural selection.

I am baffled by the way sophisticated theologians who know Adam and Eve never existed still keep talking about it.

Humans are just a very, very small part of the panoply of life, and it is arguable that in a certain sense, humans have emancipated themselves from Darwinian selection.

I was never much bothered about moral questions like, 'How could there be a good God when there's so much evil in the world?'

I was confirmed at my prep school at the age of 13.

I guess the Democrats have to pretend to be more pious than the Republicans because they are under suspicion of not being.

I read novels for entertainment rather than for edification, so I tend not to read the sort of novels that are said to illuminate the human condition.

I wouldn't want to have the thought police going to people's homes, dictating what they teach their children. I don't want to be Big Brotherish. I would hate that.

Evil is a miscellaneous collection of nasty things that nasty people do.

Nico Tinbergen was my doctoral supervisor, and he was a benign, avuncular sort of influence; everybody loved him.

My interest in biology was pretty much always on the philosophical side.

Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs.

Any teaching of falsehoods in science classes should certainly be identified and stopped by school inspectors. School inspectors should be looking at science teachings to make sure they are evidence-based science.

A constellation is not an entity at all, not the kind of thing that Uranus, or anything else, can sensibly be said to 'move into.'

Tortoises can survive for weeks without food or water, easily long enough to float in the Humboldt Current from South America to the Galapagos Islands.

I didn't know children were expected to have literary heroes, but I certainly had one, and I even identified with him at one time: Doctor Dolittle, whom I now half identify with the Charles Darwin of Beagle days.

But perhaps the rest of us could have separate classes in science appreciation, the wonder of science, scientific ways of thinking, and the history of scientific ideas, rather than laboratory experience.

I love words.

There's a mystical strain in every country, and eclipses are likely to bring that out.

I am very conscious that you can't condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours.