“Down there between our legs, it's like an entertainment complex in the middle of a sewage system. Who designed that?”

“People have a hard time accepting free-market economics for the same reason they have a hard time accepting evolution: it is counterintuitive. Life looks intelligently designed, so our natural inclination is to infer that there must be an intelligent designer--a God. Similarly, the economy looks designed, so our natural inclination is to infer that we need a designer--a government. In fact, emergence and complexity theory explains how the principles of self-organization and emergence cause complex systems to arise from simple systems without a top-down designer.”

“Molecular machines display a key signature or hallmark of design, namely, irreducible complexity. In all irreducibly complex systems in which the cause of the system is known by experience or observation, intelligent design or engineering played a role in the origin of the system... We find such systems within living organisms.”

“The cottages are full of life. It's incredible to think they are filled with people who know nothing of computerised technology, nor even running water, sewage systems or electricity. And yet here they live. Surviving.”

“The genres, it is thought, have other designs on us. They want to entertain, as opposed to rubbing our noses in the daily grit produced by the daily grind. Unhappily for realistic novelists, the larger reading public likes being entertained.”

“After two weeks of feeling dead numb, I decided the sewage system needed the pills more than I did, so I flushed them all down the toilet.”