I think a fundamentalist is somebody who believes something unshakably and isn't going to change their mind.
It doesn't hurt my feeling when I get vilified by fundamentalist religious people. I've actually made comedy out of it. I've made light of that.
Natural selection will not remove ignorance from future generations.
If you set out in a spaceship to find the one planet in the galaxy that has life, the odds against your finding it would be so great that the task would be indistinguishable, in practice, from impossible.
I don't actually think 'The Selfish Gene' is a very good title. I think that's one of my worst titles.
It's an important point to realize that the genetic programming of our lives is not fully deterministic. It is statistical - it is in any animal merely statistical - not deterministic.
Genome sequencing has changed taxonomy.
God stands out in the universe as the most glaring of all superfluous sore thumbs.
I accept that there may be things far grander and more incomprehensible than we can possibly imagine.
You can't imagine how gratifying it is to have a reader come up to you and say, 'You changed my life.'
A triumph of consciousness-raising has been the homosexual hijacking of the word 'gay.'
Saddam Hussein could have provided irreplaceable help to future historians of the Iran/Iraq war, of the invasion of Kuwait, and of the subsequent era of sanctions culminating in the current invasion.
If I say that I am more interested in preventing the slaughter of large whales than I am in improving housing conditions for people, I am likely to shock some of my friends.
We have a huge amount of DNA in common with jellyfish.
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.
There's clearly a lot of Ludditism, and you see it in all the hysteria about every scientific story.
Religion is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.
Although many of us fear death, I think there is something illogical about it.
It is immoral to brand children with religion. 'This is a Catholic child.' 'That is a Muslim child.' I want everyone to flinch when they hear such a phrase, just as they would if they heard, 'That is a Marxist child.'
Public sharing is an important part of science.