Your new book, The Meaning of Human Existence, addresses a huge question. What inspired you to tackle it?
I think it's time to be audacious. The central questions of religion and philosophy are three in number: where do we come from, what are we and where are we going? Usually these are just the beginnings of long discussions, but that's no longer the case. We now have a pretty good picture of how humanity arose in Africa, what intermediate forms existed, the rate at which these forms evolved and the circumstances in which they evolved.
So I can say, right now, that of those three great questions, we have most of the answer for where we come from. And in this book I take up the question: what are we? We're starting to close in on that one. We need to know where we came from and what we are to ...
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