Brains function on a need-to-know basis, and the need-to-know in order to survive on the African plains as hunter-gatherers. It's pure bonus if we manage to understand a bit about relativity and quantum theory as well. I think it's a tremendous privilege that we can understand as much as we can.

An Internet meme is a hijacking of the original idea. Instead of mutating by random change and spreading by a form of Darwinian selection, Internet memes are altered deliberately by human creativity. There is no attempt at accuracy of copying, as with genes - and as with memes in their original version

The selfish gene. They are in you and in me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence... they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.

It doesn't hurt my feelings when I get vilified by fundamentalist. I've actually made comedy out of it. I've made light of that.

The idea of an afterlife where you can be reunited with loved ones can be immensely consoling – though not to me.

If it is solely an evolutionary convenience, there is really no such thing as good or evil.

If you listen to two people who are arguing about something, and they each of them have passionate faith that they're right, but they believe different things—they belong to different religions, different faiths, there is nothing they can do to settle their disagreement short of shooting each other, which is what they very often actually do.

Biology is the study of the complex things in the Universe. Physics is the study of the simple ones.

There is another kind of altruism that seems to go beyond that, a kind of super-altruism, which humans appear to have. And I think that does need a Darwinian explanation.

DNA is ROM. It can be read millions of times over, but only written to once - when it is first assembled the birth of the cell in which it resides.