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What's changed is we now have good anatomical, geological, archaeological evidence that Neanderthals are not our ancestors. When I wrote 'Lucy,' I considered Neanderthals ancestors of modern humans. We have gone back twice the age of Lucy, six million years. And we see that upright bipedal walking goes back that far in time.

We know evolution happened because innumerable bits of data from myriad fields of science conjoin to paint a rich portrait of life's pilgrimage.

I think we were colonized by aliens 250,000 years ago, and they genetically altered our DNA to be primates into homo erectus and humans. I'm very interested in how we evolved so suddenly, which obviously ties in with the alien thing.

Species go extinct because there are historical contraints built into a given body or a given design.

In the last century, as we learned more about genes, we were able to devise ways of accelerating evolution.

The current understanding was that it was impossible to predict how something would evolve because it was a very turbulent environment full of things interacting with each other.

We humans have a tendency to see ourselves as completely different from other animals, and the way in which large segments of the public continue to reject the theory of evolution is just one symptom of that malaise.

The physical fabric of the world had to be such as to enable that ten billion year preliminary evolution to produce the raw materials of life. Without it there would not have been the chemical materials to allow life to evolve here on earth.

The stupendous time spans of the evolutionary past are now part of common culture (though maybe not in the United States Bible Belt, nor in parts of the Islamic world). Most people are at ease with the idea that our present biosphere is the outcome of four billion years of Darwinian evolution.

I think of evolution as a myth, like the Norse myths, the Greek myths - anybody's myths. But it was created for a rational age.