This interaction of genetic and external influences makes my behaviour unpredictable, but not undetermined. - Matt Ridley

Though politicians are regarded as scum, government as a machine is held to be almost infallible.

The process of choosing somebody to have sex with, which used to be known as falling in love, is mysterious, cerebral, and highly selective.

Evolution is something that happens to organisms. It is a directionless process that sometimes make’s an animal’s descendants more complicated, sometimes simpler, and sometimes changes them not at all. We are so steeped in notions of progress and self-improvement that we find it strangely hard to accept this. But nobody has told the coelacanth, a fish that lives off Madagascar and looks exactly like its ancestors of 300 million years ago, that it has broken some law by not “evolving.”