Molecular evidence suggests that our common ancestor with chimpanzees lived, in Africa, between five and seven million years ago, say half a million generations ago. This is not long by evolutionary standards ... in your left hand you hold the right hand of your mother. In turn she holds the hand of her mother, your grandmother. Your grandmother holds her mother's hand, and so on ... How far do we have to go until we reach our common ancestor with the chimpanzees? It is a surprisingly short way. Allowing one yard per person, we arrive at the ancestor we share with chimpanzees in under 300 miles.

We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realise that we are apes. Our common ancestor with the chimpanzees and gorillas is much more recent than their co…

Religious people split into three main groups when faced with science. I shall label them the 'know-nothings', the 'know-alls', and the 'no-contests'.

But it is we that choose to divide animals up into discontinuous species. On the evolutionary view of life there must have been intermediates, even though, con…

We are inescapably the result of a long heritage of learning, adaptation, mutation and evolution, the product of a history which predates our birth as a biolog…

I want to argue that the 'sudden' appearance of species in the fossil record and our failure to note subsequent evolutionary change within them is the proper p…

Evolution is a theory of organic change, but it does not imply, as many people assume, that ceaseless flux is the irreducible state of nature and that structur…