How does a cosmos without a bearded, bathrobed God in the sky pull off all the things that a bearded, bathrobed guy in the sky was supposed to have pulled off? If there was no God who said 'Let there be light,' where did we get all that light?

How does the cosmos create? That's not just any question, it's 'the' question. It's the God Problem.

Nearly every tribe and nearly every human being has gods. Belief in gods is all over the place. It's universal. It squeaks and squoozes from every pore of humanity.

Divinity is an emotion of being lifted out of yourself and being part of something much bigger than yourself that makes you go, 'Oh my God.' And that sense of awe? It's the second rule of science.

Everyone talks about discovery, but I really believe that great content finds its audience.

I grew up in Muenchen where my father has been a professor for pharmaceutic chemistry at the university. He had studied chemistry and medicine, having been a research student in Leipzig with Wilhelm Ostwald, the Nobel Laureate 1909. So I became familiar with the life of a scientist in a chemical laboratory quite early.

For a scientific theory of him to be possible, man, including his habits of valuation, has to be taken as determined by causal laws, as an instance and part of nature.

I've always been interested in animal behavior, and I keep reading about it because it's so surprising all the time - so many things are happening around us that we neglect to look at. Part of the passion I have for biology is based on this wonderment.