All Animals Are Minor Variations On A

That Was Unfortunate. I Should Have Compared Religion With Religion And Compared Islam Not With Trinity College But With Jews, Because The Number Of Jews Who Have Won Nobel Prizes Is Phenomenally High.

I Have Never Quite Understood - And This Is No Doubt My Failing - I Never Quite Understood Why You Would Read Fiction To Understand The Human Condition.

With So Many Mind-bytes To Be Downloaded, So Many Mental Codons To Be Replicated, It Is No Wonder That Child Brains Are Gullible, Open To Almost Any Suggestion, Vulnerable To Subversion, Easy Prey To Moonies, Scientologists And Nuns. Like Immune-deficient Patients, Children Are Wide Open To Mental Infections That Adults Might Brush Off Without Effort.

Very Close Cousins Like Humans And Chimps Have Almost All Their Genes In Common. Slightly Less Close Cousins Like Humans And Monkeys Still Have Recognizably The Same Genes. You Could Carry On Right On Down To Humans And Bacteria, And You Will Find Continuous Compelling Evidence For The Hierarchical Tree Of Cousinship.

Maybe Somewhere In Some Other Galaxy There Is A Super-intelligence So Colossal That From Our Point Of View It Would Be A God. But It Cannot Have Been The Sort Of God That We Need To Explain The Origin Of The Universe, Because It Cannot Have Been There That Early.