We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel agains… - Richard Dawkins

In the case of living machinery, the ‘designer’ is unconscious natural selection, the blind watchmaker.

Whenever a system of communication evolves, there is always the danger that some will exploit the system for their own ends.

Remember, all I am trying to establish for the moment is that we do not, as a matter of fact, derive our morals from scripture. Or, if we do, we pick and choose among the scriptures for the nice bits and reject the nasty. But then we must have some independent criterion for deciding which are the moral bits: a criterion which, wherever it comes from, cannot come from scripture itself and is presumably available to all of us whether we are religious or not.