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Richard Dawkins
291 quotes
“If you have a faith, it is statistically overwhelmingly likely that it is the same faith as your parents and grandparents had. No doubt soaring cathedrals, stirring music, moving stories and parables, help a bit. But by far the most important variable determining your religion is the accident of birth. The convictions that you so passionately believe would have been a completely different, and largely contradictory, set of convictions, if only you had happened to be born in a different place. Epidemiology, not evidence.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In one way or another, all my books have been devoted to expounding and exploring the almost limitless power of the Darwinian principle—power unleashed whenever and wherever there is enough time for the consequences of primordial self-replication to unfold.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mitochondrial DNA is blessedly celibate. (p.53)”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The world becomes full of organisms that have what it takes to become ancestors. That, in a sentence, is Darwinism.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Each generation is a filter, a sieve; good genes tend to fall through the sieve into the next generation; bad genes tend to end up in bodies that die young or without reproducing.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“... you need more than luck to navigate successfully through a thousand sieves in succession.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The river of my title is a river of DNA, and it flows through time, not space. It is a river of information, not a river of bones and tissues.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“... the genetic code is in fact literally identical in all animals, plants and bacteria ... All earthly living things are certainly descended from a single ancestor.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What is truly revolutionary about molecular biology in the post-Watson-Crick era is that it has become digital.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is no spirit-driven life force, no throbbing, heaving, pullulating, protoplasmic, mystic jelly. Life is just bytes and bytes and bytes of digital information.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Your DNA may be destined to mingle with mine. Salutations!”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Never say, and never take seriously anyone who says, "I cannot believe that so-and-so could have evolved by gradual selection". I have dubbed this kind of fallacy "the Argument from Personal Incredulity". Time and again, it has proven the prelude to an intellectual banana-skin experience.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“... it seems that it would take less than half a million years to evolve a good camera eye ... It's no wonder "the" eye has evolved at least 40 times independently around the animal kingdom ... It is a geological blink.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous – indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If there is only one Creator who made the tiger and the lamb, the cheetah and the gazelle, what is He playing at? Is he a sadist who enjoys spectator blood sports? ... Is He manoeuvring to maximise David Attenborough's television ratings?”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“... the true utility function of life, that which is being maximised in the natural world, is DNA survival. But DNA is not floating free; it is locked up in living bodies and it has made the most of the levers of power at its disposal.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We humans are an extremely important manifestation of the replication bomb, because it is through us – through our brains, our symbolic culture and our technology – that the explosion may proceed to the next stage and reverberate through deep space.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Most of what we strive for in our modern life uses the apparatus of goal seeking that was originally set up to seek goals in the state of nature.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“... but the dominance hierarchy itself is not something that natural selection favours or disfavours. What natural selection favours or disfavours is the individual behaviour of which the dominance hierarchy is a manifestation. I would put war and overpopulation in that category.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There's nothing nonsensical about saying that what would evolve if Darwinian selection has its head is something that you don't want to happen. And I could easily imagine trying to go against Darwinism.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Maybe somewhere in some other galaxy there is a super-intelligence so colossal that from our point of view it would be a god. But it cannot have been the sort of God that we need to explain the origin of the universe, because it cannot have been there that early.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“McDonald: Now a lot of people find great comfort from religion. Not everybody is as you are – well-favored, handsome, wealthy, with a good job, happy family life. I mean, your life is good – not everybody's life is good, and religion brings them comfort.Dawkins: There are all sorts of things that would be comforting. I expect an injection of morphine would be comforting – it might be more comforting, for all I know. But to say that something is comforting is not to say that it's true.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is a very helpful insight to say we are vehicles for our DNA, we are hosts for DNA parasites which are our genes. Those are insights which help us to understand an aspect of life. But it's emotive to say, that's all there is to it, we might as well give up going to Shakespeare plays and give up listening to music and things, because that's got nothing to do with it. That's an entirely different subject.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don't want to sound callous. I mean, even if I have nothing to offer, that doesn't matter, because that still doesn't mean that what anybody else has to offer therefore has to be true.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being. Aristotle was an encyclopedic polymath, an all time intellect. Yet not only can you know more than him about the world, you also can have a deeper understanding of how everything works. Such is the privilege of living after Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick and their colleagues.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It has become almost a cliché to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you want to do evil, science provides the most powerful weapons to do evil; but equally, if you want to do good, science puts into your hands the most powerful tools to do so. The trick is to want the right things, then science will provide you with the most effective methods of achieving them.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But perhaps the rest of us could have separate classes in science appreciation, the wonder of science, scientific ways of thinking, and the history of scientific ideas, rather than laboratory experience.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It really comes down to parsimony, economy of explanation. It is possible that your car engine is driven by psychokinetic energy, but if it looks like a petrol engine, smells like a petrol engine and performs exactly as well as a petrol engine, the sensible working hypothesis is that it is a petrol engine.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's been suggested that if the super-naturalists really had the powers they claim, they'd win the lottery every week. I prefer to point out that they could also win a Nobel Prize for discovering fundamental physical forces hitherto unknown to science. Either way, why are they wasting their talents doing party turns on television?By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How do we account for the current paranormal vogue in the popular media? Perhaps it has something to do with the millennium – in which case it's depressing to realise that the millennium is still three years away.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You contain a trillion copies of a large, textual document written in a highly accurate, digital code, each copy as voluminous as a substantial book. I'm talking, of course, of the DNA in your cells.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You don't have to be a scientist – you don't have to play the Bunsen burner – in order to understand enough science to overtake your imagined need and fill that fancied gap. Science needs to be released from the lab into the culture.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Orb webs in real life do their business largely in two dimensions. If the mesh is too coarse, flies pass straight through. If the mesh is too fine, rival spiders will achieve nearly the same result at less cost in silk, and will therefore leave behind more progeny to carry on their economically more prudent genes. Natural selection finds the efficient compromise.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In fact writing a computer program is a pretty good way to summarize knowledge about any set of rules.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Natural selection is an extremely simple process, in the sense that very little machinery needs to be set up in order for it to work. Of course the effects and consequences of natural selection are complex in the extreme. But in order to set natural selection going on a real planet, all that is required is the existence of inherited information.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mutation may be random, but selection definitely is not.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is easy to think of DNA as the information by which a body makes another body like itself. It would be more correct to see a body as the vehicle used by DNA to make more DNA like itself.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is no doubt that whales and dugongs come with their dry-land history written all over them. If they had been deliberately created for the sea, they’d be very different, and a lot more like fish than they are. Animals that have their history written all over them are among the most graphic pieces of evidence we have that living things were not created for their present ways of life but evolved from very different ancestors.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Darwin, however, saw his doubts as a challenge to go on thinking, not a welcome excuse to give up.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The plaint that there hasn’t been enough time for the eye to evolve turns out to be not just wrong but dramatically, decisively, ignominiously wrong.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“On one point, though, I insist. This is that wherever in nature there is a sufficiently powerful illusion of good design for some purpose, natural selection is the only known mechanism that can account for it.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The attitude that living things are placed here for our benefit still dominates our culture, even where its underpinnings have disappeared. We now need, for purposes of scientific understanding, to find a less human-centered view of the natural world.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that make life worth living and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have for living is quite finite.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes to a sumptous planet, sparkling with colour, beautiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn't it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we came to wake up in it?”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[If] there is mercy in nature, it is accidental. Nature is neither kind nor cruel but indifferent.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But it is we that choose to divide animals up into discontinuous species. On the evolutionary view of life there must have been intermediates, even though, conveniently for our naming rituals, they are usually extinct.”
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source