“It’s highly plausible that in the universe there are God-like creatures,” says evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, but belief in the supernatural strikes him as incurious, which is perhaps the worst insult he can imagine. “Religion teaches you to be satisfied with nonanswers,” he says. “It’s a sort of crime against childhood.”

His first children’s book, The Magic of Reality, appears this fall.

He talks of the possibility that we might co-evolve with computers, a silicon destiny. And he suggests that “consciousness has to be there [in dogs]…It’s an evolved, emergent quality of brains. It’s very likely that most mammals have consciousness, and probably birds, too.”