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Richard Dawkins
291 quotes
“Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have a chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Darwin's ‘survival of the fittest’ is really a special case of a more general law of survival of the stable. The universe is populated by stable things. The universe is populated by stable things. A stable thing is a collection of atoms that is permanent enough or common enough to deserve a name. It may be a unique collection of atoms, such as the Matterhorn, that lasts long enough to be worth naming. Or it may be a class of entities, such as rain drops, that come into existence at a sufficiently high rate to deserve a collective name, even if any one of them is short-lived.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Genes do indirectly control the manufacture of bodies, and the influence is strictly one way: acquired characteristics are not inherited. No matter how much knowledge and wisdom you acquire during your life, not one jot will be passed on to your children by genetic means. Each new generation starts from scratch.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No doubt some of your cousins and great-uncles died in childhood, but not a single one of your ancestors did. Ancestors just don't die young!”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Survival machines that can simulate the future are one jump ahead of survival machines that who can only learn of the basis of trial and error. The trouble with overt trial is that it takes time and energy. The trouble with overt error is that it is often fatal. ...The evolution of the capacity to simulate seems to have culminated in subjective consciousness. Why this should have happened is, to me, the most profound mystery facing modern biology.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The genes are the master programmers, and they are programming for their lives.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whenever a system of communication evolves, there is always the danger that some will exploit the system for their own ends.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Group selection theory would therefore predict a tendency to evolve towards an all-dove conspiracy ... But the trouble with conspiracies, even those that are to everybody's advantage in the long run, is that they are open to abuse.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“... a lion wants to eat an antelope's body, but the antelope has very different plans for its body. This is not normally regarded as competition for a resource, but logically it is hard to see why not.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What is the selfish gene? It is not just one single physical bit of DNA. Just as in the primeval soup, it is all replicas of a particular bit of DNA, distributed throughout the world.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“... a gene might be able to assist replicas of itself that are sitting in other bodies. If so, this would appear as individual altruism but it would be brought about by gene selfishness.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is normally possible to be much more certain who your children are than who your brothers are. And you can be more certain still who you yourself are!”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The truth is that all examples of child protection and parental care, and all associated bodily organs ... are examples of the working in nature of the kin-selection principle.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But you cannot have an unnatural welfare state, unless you also have unnatural birth control, otherwise the end result will be misery even greater than that which obtains in nature.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is hard to believe that this simple truth is not understood by those leaders who forbid their followers to use effective contraceptive methods. They express a preference for ‘natural’ methods of population limitation, and a natural method is exactly what they are going to get. It is called starvation.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A system whereby each child told the parent how hungry he was would be ideal for the parent, and, as we have seen, such a system seems to have evolved. But the young are in a strong position to lie, because they know exactly how hungry they are, while the parent can only guess whether they are telling the truth or not. It is almost impossible for a parent to detect a small lie, although it might see through a big one.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Elizabeth II is a direct descendant of William the Conqueror. Yet it is quite probable that she bares not a single one of the old king's genes.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If we want to know where the truth lies in particular cases, we have to look. What the Darwinian corpus gives us is not detailed expectations about particular organisms. It gives us something subtler and more valuable: understanding of principle. But if we must have myths, the real facts about vampires could tell a different moral tale.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Replicators are no longer peppered freely through the sea; they are packaged in huge colonies—individual bodies. And phenotypic consequences, instead of being evenly distributed throughout the world, have in many cases congealed into those same bodies. But the individual body, so familiar to us on our planet, did not have to exist. The only kind of entity that has to exist in order for life to arise, anywhere in the universe, is the immortal replicator.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind's eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“However many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mutation is random; natural selection is the very opposite of random.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Natural selection is all about the differential success of rival DNA in getting itself transmitted vertically in the species archives.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To explain the origin of the DNA/protein machine by invoking a supernatural Designer is to explain precisely nothing, for it leaves unexplained the origin of the Designer.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our subjective judgment of what seems like a good bet is irrelevant to what is actually a good bet.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Contrary to earlier prejudices, there is nothing inherently progressive about evolution.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Evolution normally does not come to a halt, but constantly ‘tracks’ the changing environment.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is generally characteristic of arms races, including human ones, that although all would be better off if none of them escalated, so long as one of them escalates none can afford not to.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There has been progress in design, but not progress in accomplishment.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The successful scientist and the raving crank are separated by the quality of their inspirations. But I suspect that this amounts, in practice, to a difference, not so much in ability to notice analogies as in ability to reject foolish analogies and pursue helpful ones.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are people in the world who desperately want not to have to believe in Darwinism.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This not only misses the point, it is the precise antithesis of the point.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is one particular property of living things, however, that I want to single out as explicable only by Darwinian selection. This property is the one that has been the recurring topic of this book: adaptive complexity.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If we want to postulate a deity capable of engineering all the organized complexity in the world, either instantaneously or by guiding evolution, that deity must have been vastly complex in the first place. The creationist, whether a naive Bible-thumper or an educated bishop, simply postulates an already existing being of prodigious intelligence and complexity. If we are going to allow ourselves the luxury of postulating organized complexity without offering an explanation, we might as well make a job of it and simply postulate the existence of life as we know it!”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Another force driving progressive evolution is the so-called "arms-race." Prey animals evolve faster running speeds because predators do. Consequently predators have to evolve even faster running speeds, and so on, in an escalating spiral. Such arms races probably account for the spectacularly advanced engineering of eyes, ears, brains, bat "radar" and all the other high-tech weaponry that animals display.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It may be that brain hardware has co-evolved with the internal virtual worlds that it creates. This can be called hardware-software co-evolution.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is an article of passionate faith among "politically correct" biologists and anthropologists that brain size has no connection with intelligence; that intelligence has nothing to do with genes; and that genes are probably nasty fascist things anyway.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The likelihood is that, in 100,000 years time, we shall either have reverted to wild barbarism, or else civilisation will have advanced beyond all recognition – into colonies in outer space, for instance. In either case, evolutionary extrapolations from present conditions are likely to be highly misleading.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The late , a psychologist and author, calculated that if the motor car had evolved as fast as the computer, and over the same time period, "Today you would be able to buy a for £35, it would do three million miles to the gallon, and it would deliver enough power to drive the QE2 And if you were interested in miniaturisation, you could place half a dozen of them on a pinhead.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Scientific and technological progress themselves are value-neutral. They are just very good at doing what they do. If you want to do selfish, greedy, intolerant and violent things, scientific technology will provide you with by far the most efficient way of doing so. But if you want to do good, to solve the world's problems, to progress in the best value-laden sense, once again, there is no better means to those ends than the scientific way.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have just discovered that without her father's consent this sweet, trusting, gullible six-year-old is being sent, for weekly instruction, to a Roman Catholic nun. What chance has she?”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“With so many mind-bytes to be downloaded, so many mental codons to be replicated, it is no wonder that child brains are gullible, open to almost any suggestion, vulnerable to subversion, easy prey to Moonies, Scientologists and nuns. Like immune-deficient patients, children are wide open to mental infections that adults might brush off without effort.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Think about the two qualities that a virus, or any sort of parasitic replicator, demands of a friendly medium, the two qualities that make cellular machinery so friendly towards parasitic DNA, and that make computers so friendly towards computer viruses. These qualities are, firstly, a readiness to replicate information accurately, perhaps with some mistakes that are subsequently reproduced accurately; and, secondly, a readiness to obey instructions encoded in the information so replicated.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ten years ago, you could have traveled thousands of miles through the United States and never seen a baseball cap turned back to front. Today, the reverse baseball cap is ubiquitous. I do not know what the pattern of geographical spread of the reverse baseball cap precisely was, but epidemiology is certainly among the professions primarily qualified to study it.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Like computer viruses, successful mind viruses will tend to be hard for their victims to detect. If you are the victim of one, the chances are that you won't know it, and may even vigorously deny it. Accepting that a virus might be difficult to detect in your own mind, what tell-tale signs might you look out for? I shall answer by imaging how a medical textbook might describe the typical symptoms of a sufferer (arbitrarily assumed to be male).”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The patient typically finds himself impelled by some deep, inner conviction that something is true, or right, or virtuous: a conviction that doesn't seem to owe anything to evidence or reason, but which, nevertheless, he feels as totally compelling and convincing. We doctors refer to such a belief as "faith".”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source