No Matter How Smart You Are, You're

Has It Ever Occurred To You How Lucky You Are To Be Alive? More Than 99 Percent Of All The Creatures That Have Ever Lived Have Died Without Progeny, But Not A Single One Of Your Ancestors Falls Into That Group! ... Not A Single One Of Your Ancestors, All The Way Back To The Bacteria, Succumbed To Predation Before Reproducing, Or Lost Out In The Competition For A Mate.

Philosophers' Syndrome: Mistaking A Failure Of The Imagination For An Insight Into Necessity.

Isn't It True That Whatever Isn't Determined By Our Genes Must Be Determined By Our Environment? What Else Is There? There's Nature And There's Nurture. Is There Also Some X, Some Further Contributor To What We Are? There's Chance. Luck. This Extra Ingredient Is Important But Doesn't Have To Come From The Quantum Bowels Of Our Atoms Or From Some Distant Star. It Is All Around Us In The Causeless Coin-flipping Of Our Noisy World, Automatically Filling In The Gaps Of Specification Left Unfixed By Our Genes, And Unfixed By Salient Causes In Our Environment.

Now That Mobile Phones And The Internet Have Altered The Epistemic Selective Landscape In A Revolutionary Way, Every Religious Organisation Must Scramble To Evolve Defences Or Become Extinct.

To Put It Bluntly But Fairly, Anyone Today Who Doubts That The Variety Of Life On This Planet Was Produced By A Process Of Evolution Is Simply Ignorant — Inexcusably Ignorant, In A World Where Three Out Of Four People Have Learned To Read And Write.