Natural Selection Is Anything But Random.

Science Has Taught Us, Against All Intuition, That Apparently Solid Things Like Crystals And Rocks Are Really Almost Entirely Composed Of Empty Space. And The Familiar Illustration Is The Nucleus Of An Atom Is A Fly In The Middle Of A Sports Stadium, And The Next Atom Is In The Next Sports Stadium.

People Who Believe In Something For Which There Is Not A Shred Of Evidence Act On That Belief And, Above All, Impose Their Beliefs On Others, They Make Me Cross, And They Make Me Especially Cross When They Impose Their Beliefs On Defenceless Children.

People Like To Trace Their Ancestry.

Chaos Theory, A More Recent Invention, Is Equally Fertile Ground For Those With A Bent For Abusing Sense. It Is Unfortunately Named, For 'chaos' Implies Randomness. Chaos In The Technical Sense Is Not Random At All. It Is Completely Determined, But It Depends Hugely, In Strangely Hard-to-predict Ways, On Tiny Differences In Initial Conditions.

Show Me A Cultural Relativist At 30,000 Feet And I'll Show You A Hypocrite ... If You Are Flying To An International Congress Of Anthropologists Or Literary Critics, The Reason You Will Probably Get There - The Reason You Don't Plummet Into A Ploughed Field - Is That A Lot Of Western Scientifically Trained Engineers Have Got Their Sum Right.