Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science

‘Concentrating only on the usefulness of science is a bit like celebrating music because it is good exercise for the violinist’s right arm.’

The world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity and richness and strangeness that is absolutely awesome. I mean the idea that such complexity can arise not only out of such simplicity, but probably absolutely out of nothing, is the most fabulous, extraordinary idea. And once you get some kind of inkling of how that might have happened – it’s ju

It is truly astonishing that his main objection to my lecturing on evolution was that I held ‘views that are not shared and are not representative of the thinking of a majority of the citizens of Oklahoma’. What does Rep. Thomsen think a university is for?

Richard tells a lovely, if slightly macabre, story about his legs. After they were amputated in Cambridge he wanted, for sentimental reasons, to bury them in his beloved Kenya. He had to get permission to transport them, and bureaucracy insisted that this was possible only if he could produce a death certificate. He very reasonably argued that he w

Jews, who constitute less than 1 per cent of the world’s population, have won more than 20 per cent of all Nobel Prizes. This makes a poignant contrast with the derisorily low success rate of the world’s Muslims, who are orders of magnitude more numerous in the world. I thought – still do – the comparison revealing. Whether you think of Judaism and

Organisms, especially animals (plants less so), are coherent, unified bodies that either survive as a whole or die as a whole. And when an animal dies, all its replicators die with it, except those that have previously been handed on to another organism in the process of reproduction. Do you begin to see how apt the word ‘vehicle’ is? And ‘throwawa

God is Not Great complements rather than competes with The God Delusion. Where I, as a scientist, am most concerned with religious faith as a rival to science in the role of explainer, Christopher’s objections were more political and moral. He found repugnant the very idea of a celestial dictator who demands total obedience and devotion, and is pre

There are, on the other hand, good reasons to go back to scripture as literature, because, as I also said in The God Delusion, our whole culture is so bound up with it that you can’t take your allusions or understand your history if you are biblically illiterate. Indeed, I filled two pages with close-packed biblical quotations, phrases familiar to

The simpler you make your god, the less qualified he is to explain the complexity of the world. And the more complex you make him, the more does he require an explanation in his own right.