Welcome to our collection of quotes by Richard Dawkins. We hope you enjoy pondering them and please share widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins (born 26 March 1941) is a British evolutionary biologist and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford and was Professor for Public Understanding of Science in the University of Oxford from 1995 to 2008. An atheist, he is well known for his criticism of creationism and intelligent design.
Dawkins first came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which popularised the gene-centred view of evolution and introduced the term meme. With his book The Extended Phenotype (1982), he introduced into evolutionary biology the influential concept that the phenotypic effects of a gene are not necessarily limited to an organism's body, but can stretch far into the environment. In 2006, he founded the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science.
In The Blind Watchmaker (1986), Dawkins argues against the watchmaker analogy, an argument for the existence of a supernatural creator based upon the complexity of living organisms. Instead, he describes evolutionary processes as analogous to a blind watchmaker, in that reproduction, mutation, and selection are unguided by any designer. In The God Delusion (2006), Dawkins contends that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that religious faith is a delusion. Dawkins's atheist stances have sometimes attracted controversy.
Dawkins has been awarded academic and writing awards, and he makes television, radio, and internet appearances, predominantly discussing his books, atheism, and his ideas and opinions as a public intellectual.
Placebos work.
I love words.
If saying that religion should be a private matter and should not have special influence in public life is illiberal, then 74% of U.K. Christians are illiberal, too.
The truth is more magical in the best and most exciting sense of the word, than any myth or made-up mystery or miracle. Science has its own magic: the magic of reality.
There is another kind of altruism that seems to go beyond that, a kind of super-altruism, which humans appear to have. And I think that does need a Darwinian explanation.
If you don't know anything about computers, just remember that they are machines that do exactly what you tell them but often surprise you in the result.
It doesn't hurt my feelings when I get vilified by fundamentalist. I've actually made comedy out of it. I've made light of that.
All life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities.
DNA is ROM. It can be read millions of times over, but only written to once -- when it is first assembled the birth of the cell in which it resides.
I am agnostic only to the extent that I am agnostic about fairies at the bottom of the garden.
There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point? The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it.
The idea of an afterlife where you can be reunited with loved ones can be immensely consoling though not to me.
The fear of Hell is a very powerful motivation.
Biology is the study of the complex things in the Universe. Physics is the study of the simple ones.
Being an atheist frees you up to live this life properly, happily, and fully.
Discrimination is not liberal. Arguing against discrimination is not intolerance.
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
You could almost define a philosopher as someone who won't take common sense for an answer.
We are survival machines -- robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.
Longer Version:
We are survival machines -- robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.
It is an essential part of the scientific enterprise to admit ignorance, even to exult in ignorance as a challenge to future conquests.
Genetic modification, like any other kind of modification, is good if you modify in a good direction, bad if you modify in a bad direction.
Human psychology has a near universal tendency to let belief be coloured by desire.
All religious beliefs seem weird to those not brought up in them.
All animals are minor variations on a very particular theme.
The chicken is only an egg's way for making another egg.
Who will say with confidence that sexual abuse is more permanently damaging to children than threatening them with the eternal and unquenchable fires of hell?
The important thing to remember about mathematics is not to be frightened.
Regarding the accusations of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests, deplorable and disgusting as those abuses are, they are not so harmful to the children as the grievous mental harm in bringing up the child Catholic in the first place.
It often turns out on closer inspection that acts of apparent altruism are really selfishness in disguise.
Atheism is not a religion. Abstinence is not a sex position.
Do you really mean the only reason you try to be good is to gain God's approval and reward? That's not morality, that's just sucking up.
You don't believe that the Earth is round only if you're an astronaut. You don't believe Napoleon existed only if you're a historian. You believe these things because they're facts, proved by evidence.
The genetic code is not a binary code as in computers, nor an eight-level code as in some telephone systems, but a quaternary code with four symbols. The machine code of the genes is uncannily computerlike.
There are no natural borderlines in evolution. The illusion of a borderline is created by the fact that the evolutionary intermediates happen to be extinct.
I think there could be a very large number who are creationists by default. Those are the people I want to reach.
Just because science so far has failed to explain something, such as consciousness, to say it follows that the facile, pathetic explanations which religion has produced somehow by default must win the argument is really quite ridiculous.
If it is solely an evolutionary convenience, there is really no such thing as good or evil.
Words are our servants, not our masters. For different purposes, we find it convenient to use words in different senses.
The thing that defines a species is that all members have the same addressing system for their DNA.
DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.
There is an attitude in the culture that says that everybody is entitled to their opinion. You got to respect their opinion. No, you damn well haven't got to respect their opinion.
Are science and religion converging? No. There are modern scientists whose words sound religious but whose beliefs, on close examination, turn out to be identical to those of other scientists who straightforwardly call themselves atheists.
What shall it profit a male if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his immortal genes?
The body is a survival machine programmed to propagate the genes that reside inside it.
In true natural selection, if a body has what it takes to survive, its genes automatically survive because they are inside it. So the genes that survive tend to be, automatically, those genes that confer on bodies the qualities that assist them to survive.
Evolution could so easily be disproved if just a single fossil turned up in the wrong date order. Evolution has passed this test with flying colours.
Even if not a single fossil has ever been found, the evidence from surviving animals would still overwhelmingly force the conclusion that Darwin was right.
My computer is a very complex gadget and it was designed by many designers, so why must the universe have only a single designer and not many designers?
Which of our unnoticed isms will the hindsight of future generations condemn?
Earlier than about 10,000 years ago, all human populations were hunter gatherers. Soon, probably none will be. Those not extinct will be 'civilised' -- or corrupted, depending on your point of view.
The illusion of design is so successful that to this day most Americans (including, significantly, many influential and rich Americans) stubbornly refuse to believe it is an illusion.
Anybody who objects to cloning on principle has to answer to all the identical twins in the world who might be insulted by the thought that there is something offensive about their very existence. Clones are simply identical twins.
Evolution is just a theory? Well, so is gravity and I don't see you jumping out of buildings.
You can legally lie about the real world to your heart's content, but until some human being is materially damaged, nobody will complain.
I read in the paper today the list of the most popular boys' names in Britain. The first was Jack, the second was Mohammed. That makes me feel a little bit worried.
Our brains have evolved to help us survive within the orders of magnitude of size and speed which our bodies operate at. We never evolved to navigate in the world of atoms.
Science shares with religion the claim that it answers deep questions about origins, the nature of life, and the cosmos. But there the resemblance ends. Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not.
I mean it as a compliment when I say that you could almost define a philosopher as someone who won't take common sense for an answer.
We don't need fossils -- the case for evolution is watertight without them; so it is paradoxical to use gaps in the fossil record as though they were evidence against evolution.
It's known that stress gives rise to disease. It's also known that many diseases, especially stress-related diseases, can be cured by placebos -- pills that have no medicinal effect, but people think they do, and so they do.
We accept that people are irrational for good Darwinian reasons. But I don't think we should be so pessimistic as to think that therefore we're forever condemned to be irrational.
I'm sure Obama is an atheist, I'm sure Kennedy was an atheist, but I doubt if Pope Frank is.
I am persuaded that 'child abuse' is no exaggeration when used to describe what teachers and priests are doing to children whom they encourage to believe in something like...eternal hell.
Mysteries do not lose their poetry when solved. Quite the contrary; the solution often turns out more beautiful than the puzzle and, in any case, when you have solved one mystery you uncover others, perhaps to inspire greater poetry.
The fact that we can neither prove nor disprove the existence of something does not put existence and non-existence on an even footing.
The habit of questioning authority is one of the most valuable gifts that a book, or a teacher, can give a young would-be scientist.
I am not an enthusiast for diversity of opinion where facts are concerned.
Ideally, I'd like everybody to be secular.
The best scientists can do is fail to disprove things while pointing to how hard they tried.
Religious faith not only lacks evidence, its independence from evidence is its pride and joy, shouted from the rooftops.
Religion is the root of quite a lot of evil.
Our subjective judgment of what seems like a good bet is irrelevant to what is actually a good bet.
There is no reason to regard God as immune from consideration along the spectrum of probabilities. And there is certainly no reason to suppose that, just because God can be neither proved nor disproved, his probability of existence is 50 per cent.
Human suffering has been caused because too many of us cannot grasp that words are only tools for our use.
The mere presence in the dictionary of a word like 'living' does not mean it necessarily has to refer to something definite in the real world.
Germ-line replicators, then, are units that actually survive or fail to survive, the difference constituting natural selection.
Race does not come into it. It is pure religion and culture. Something about the cultural tradition of Jews is way, way more sympathetic to science and learning and intellectual pursuits than Islam. That would have been a fair comparison.
The idea of tiny changes cumulated over many steps is an immensely powerful idea, capable of explaining an enormous range of things that would be otherwise inexplicable.
There is a tendency for people to say evolution is only a theory. That is inappropriate.
Some people find clarity threatening. They like muddle, confusion, obscurity. So when somebody does no more than speak clearly it sounds threatening.
It is the effects on the world of successful active germ-line replicators that we see as adaptations.
There is a hierarchy of entities embedded in larger entities, and in theory the concept of vehicle might be applied to any level of the hierarchy.
The universe is a strange and wondrous place. The truth is quite odd enough to need no help from pseudoscientific charlatans.
You believe that all humanity came from Adam and Eve, and humans have not evolved at all since. So tell me; between the two of them, which was black, which was white, and which was Asian?
Alister McGrath has now written two books with my name in the title. The poet W. B. Yeats, when asked to say something about bad poets who made a living by parasitizing him, wrote the splendid line, 'was there ever dog that praised his fleas?
The assignment of purpose to everything is called teleology. Children are native teleologists, and many never grow out of it.