On bad days I think I'd like to be a plastic surgeon who goes to Third World countries and operates on children in villages with airlifts and then I think 'Yeah right I'm going to go back to undergraduate school and take all the biology I missed and then go to medical school.' No. No.

When the first fossils began to be found in eastern Africa in the late 1950s I thought what a wonderful marriage this was biology and anthropology. I was around 16 years old when I made this particular choice of academic pursuit.

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is 'The Book of British Birds ' and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.

A universe with a God would look quite different from a universe without one. A physics a biology where there is a God is bound to look different. So the most basic claims of religion are scientific. Religion is a scientific theory.

The kitchen's a laboratory and everything that happens there has to do with science. It's biology chemistry physics. Yes there's history. Yes there's artistry. Yes to all of that. But what happened there what actually happens to the food is all science.

Wherever there is a design that is highly successful in a broad range of similar environments it is apt to emerge again and again independently - the phenomenon known in biology as convergent evolution. I call these designs 'good tricks.'

Survival in the cool economics of biology means simply the persistence of one's own genes in the generations to follow.

We were making the first step out of the age of chemistry and physics and into the age of biology.

Religion is the best antidote to the individualism of the consumer age. The idea that society can do without it flies in the face of history and now evolutionary biology.