Having a family can be a rude awakening for some people but it wasn't like that for me. I've absolutely loved it and I still do. I've got two daughters, Polly and Camilla, in their late 20s now. You get these people who say, "Wait for the terrible twos," and, yes, they've had the odd flounce, but they've got increasingly joyful to be around. My wife Alice and I are very close to them and value their company hugely.

We always tried to share experiences with them. It was a little more difficult for them after the astronaut business, but they’ve responded well. All three are happily married, with their youngsters. And they’re not just happy homemakers. They’re all involved in little projects of their own, because they are challenged by wanting to help local charities, or wanting to start a business. I think they have turned out reasonably well.

Parenting is the wildest adventure and vocation that can happen to a person. Every day is different and there is no static. So, you have to kind of surrender to the process, which is a hard thing to do for somebody like me who prefers to have order in my life.

I’m much much closer to my children than my father was to me, and I would hope that the quality of love I’ve given them is different from the quality my father gave me.

I realized I took ideas from philosophers like Dan Dennett. I took ideas from evolutionary biologists like John Maynard Smith. I took ideas from people who were trying to implement evolution for things like RNA, so people like Jerry Joyce at Scripps. I took ideas from lots of people who could explain their ideas well, so I’ve been influenced by many. I’ve built my ideas on the contributions of many. And, of course, that’s what evolution does. It mutates and recombines what’s already there. Nothing comes out of nothing, right? It all comes on the back of what was there.

I’m proud any time that I see a toxic chemical process, something that produces toxic waste or requires precious metals, which have to be mined at terrible environmental degradation costs — I’m proud when I see that replaced with a clean, efficient biological process that doesn’t produce those things. And we have to do that a million times over in order to move away from our addiction to this old-fashioned chemistry that we do.