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Good morning. In an interview to mark his 75th birthday, Stephen Hawking told the �鶹��: “I fear evolution has inbuilt greed and aggression to the human genome.” He warned that there is no sign of conflict lessening, that technology will only make it worse and that, quote, “The best hope for the survival of the human race might be independent colonies in space.” As Professor Hubert J Farnsworth says in the TV show Futurama: “I don’t want to live on this planet anymore.” But is evacuation the answer to humanity’s failings? No. I cannot accept the professor’s prescription even if I find myself in surprising agreement over the diagnosis. When scientists talk about the “selfish gene”, many religious people like me think it sounds rather like Original Sin – and there is a consensus, whether you see it as biological or metaphysical, that greed and violence are part of human nature. But if destructiveness is innate to man, why would relocating man from Earth to Mars solve the problem? We’ve tried this trick before. In the 17th century, the Puritans left behind the decadence of Europe to build a utopia, a “city upon a hill”, in colonial America. Looking at America today, many would conclude that they failed. In a few hundred years’ time some Europeans will be moaning about colonial Mars in the same way that they moan about the United States of Donald Trump. You can run away from your problems but you can’t run away from yourself. To build a better world, I’d argue, we have to focus on the here and now – and begin by acknowledging our own, personal faults. Happily, science and religion also agree that we can do this. Let us say that we have indeed evolved a capacity for selfishness. But we have also evolved the capacity to love, to write laws and to imagine a more just order. Religious people might call this the God-given conscience – a capacity for decency etched into our DNA. We are engaged in an ongoing struggle between our temptation to do whatever we want and a little voice in our heads that says we ought to put others first. It is this ability to reason, and not merely to act on instinct, that makes us distinct from animals. We don’t celebrate this difference nearly enough, although the very fact that we focus so obsessively on what’s wrong with humankind is itself a tribute to humankind’s conscience. By articulating his own grave concerns about the future of humanity, Professor Hawking demonstrates that we retain the ability to see our faults – and that gives me hope that we can eventually overcome them.