The one thing I would try to teach the world about science is that science is not a catalogue of facts, but a search for new mysteries. Science increases the store of wonder and mystery in the world; it does not erode it.

The myth, started by the Romantic poets, that science gets rid of mysteries was well nailed by Albert Einstein - whose thought experiments about relativity are far more otherworldly, elusive, thrilling and baffling than anything dreamt up by poets. Isaac Newton showed us the mysteries of deep space, Charles Darwin showed us the mysteries of deep time, and Francis Crick and James D Watson showed us the mysteries of deep encoding. To get rid of those insights would be to reduce the world's stock of awe.

Matt Ridley is author of books including The Agile Gene: How Nature Turns on Nurture (buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA)), and Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters (buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA)).