Lamarckism. Its key idea is that improvements acquired by an organism during its lifetime can be inherited by its offspring.

SOCRATES: Because our eyes are delicate, they have been shuttered with eyelids that open when we have occasion to use them . . . And our foreheads have been fringed with eyebrows to prevent damage from the sweat of the head . . . And the mouth set close to the eyes and nostrils as a portal of ingress for all our supplies, whereas, since matter pass

The prospect of the unlimited creation of knowledge in the future conflicts with creationism by undercutting its motivation. For eventually, with the assistance of what we would consider stupendously powerful computers, any child will be capable of designing and implementing a better, more complex, more beautiful, and also far more moral biosphere

Another assumed characteristic of the designer according to most religions is benevolence. But, as I mentioned in Chapter 3, the biosphere is much less pleasant for its inhabitants than anything that a benevolent, or even halfway decent, human designer would design. In theological contexts this is known as ‘the problem of suffering’ or ‘the problem

It is inevitable that we face problems, but no particular problem is inevitable. We survive, and thrive, by solving each problem as it comes up. And, since the human ability to transform nature is limited only by the laws of physics, none of the endless stream of problems will ever constitute an impassable barrier. So a complementary and equally im

no utopia is possible, but only because our values and our objectives can continue to improve indefinitely.

In chemistry, every stable element that exists anywhere is also present on or just below the Earth’s surface. In biology, copious evidence of the nature of life is ubiquitous in the biosphere – and within arm’s reach, in our own DNA. As far as we know, all the fundamental constants of nature can be measured here, and every fundamental law can be te

A gene pool is carved and whittled through generations of ancestral natural selection to fit [a particular] environment. In theory a knowledgeable zoologist, presented with the complete transcript of a genome [the set of all the genes of an organism], should be able to reconstruct the environmental circumstances that did the carving. In this sense

So the biosphere is incapable of supporting human life. From the outset, it was only human knowledge that made the planet even marginally habitable by humans, and the enormously increased capacity of our life-support system since then (in terms both of numbers and of security and quality of life) has been entirely due to the creation of human knowl