The Way Evolution Always Discovers

There May Be Things That Are Completely Unknowable To Us, So We Must Be Careful Not To Treat The Limits Of Our Knowledge As Sure Guides To The Limit Of What There Is.

Let Me Lay My Cards On The Table. If I Were To Give An Award For The Single Best Idea Anyone Ever Had, I'd Give It To Darwin, Ahead Of Even Newton Or Einstein And Everyone Else. In A Single Stroke, The Idea Of Evolution By Natural Selection Unifies The Realm Of Life, Meaning, And Purpose With The Realm Of Space And Time, Cause And Effect, Mechanism And Physical Law. It Is Not Just A Wonderful Idea. It Is A Dangerous Idea.

My Faith In The Expertise Of Physicists Like Richard Feynman, For Instance, Permits Me To Endorse—and, If It Comes To It, Bet Heavily On The Truth Of—a Proposition That I Don't Understand. So Far, My Faith Is Not Unlike Religious Faith, But I Am Not In The Slightest Bit Motivated To Go To My Death Rather Than Recant The Formulas Of Physics. Watch: E Doesn't Equal Mc2, It Doesn't, It Doesn't! I Was Lying, So There!

Cults And Prophets Proclaiming The Imminent End Of The World Have Been With Us For Several Millennia, And It Has Been Another Sour Sort Of Fun To Ridicule Them The Morning After, When They Discover That Their Calculations Were A Little Off. But, Just As With Marxists, There Are Some Among Them Who Are Working Hard To "hasten The Inevitable," Not Merely Anticipating The End Days With Joy In Their Hearts, But Taking Political Action To Bring About The Conditions They Think Are The Prerequisites For That Occasion.

Homunculi Are Bogeymen Only If They Duplicate Entire The Talents They Are Rung In To Explain. If One Can Get A Team Or Committee Of Relatively Ignorant, Narrow-minded, Blind Homunculi To Produce The Intelligent Behaviour Of The Whole, This Is Progress.