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6b510b5
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Bad things happen because things happen.
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Richard Dawkins |
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a9bcd50
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We think we know that chimpanzees are higher animals and earthworms are lower, we think we've always known what that means, and we think evolution makes it even clearer. But it doesn't. It is by no means clear that it means anything at all. Or if it means anything, it means so many different things to be misleading, even pernicious.
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science
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Richard Dawkins |
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71ab0b9
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Watson retorted: 'Well I don't think we're for anything.
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Richard Dawkins |
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728be5f
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Evil...doesn't mean doing things that have bad consequences for people. It means private thoughts and actions that are not to "the Christian majority's" private liking."
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christianity
evil
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Richard Dawkins |
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97e933a
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Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence.
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Richard Dawkins |
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2d591d3
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You can't get away with saying, 'If you try to stop me from insulting homosexuals it violates my freedom of prejudice.' But you can get away with saying, 'It violates my freedom of religion.' What, when you think about it, is the difference? Yet again, religion trumps all.
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Richard Dawkins |
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1bac605
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In very different ways, the possibility that the universe is teeming with life, and the opposite possibility that we are totally alone, are equally exciting. Either way, the urge to know more about the universe seems to me irresistible, and I cannot imagine that anybody of truly poetic sensibility could disagree.
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extraterrestrial-life
life
science
universe
wonder
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Richard Dawkins |
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fbbea83
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Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.
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Richard Dawkins |
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b23f74b
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The genes are master programmers, and they are programming for their lives.
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Richard Dawkins |
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a2882c6
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There is something distinctly odd about the argument, however. Believing is not something you can decide to do as a matter of policy. At least, it is not something I can decide to do as an act of will. I can decide to go to church and I can decide to recite the Nicene Creed, and I can decide to swear on a stack of bibles that I believe every word inside them. But none of that can make me actually believe it if I don't. Pascal's Wager could ..
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belief
god
pascals-wager
religion
theology
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Richard Dawkins |
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276fef7
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Science doesn't have all the answers, but it is good at spotting the important questions when they are camouflaged against a background of common sense.
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Richard Dawkins |
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80c2a36
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We should always be open-minded, but the only good reason to believe that something exists is if there is real evidence that it does.
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Richard Dawkins |
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af80e0a
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Despite the Great Chain of Being's traditional ranking of humans between animals and angels, there is no evolutionary justification for the common assumption that evolution is somehow 'aimed' at humans, or that humans are 'evolution's last word'.
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science
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Richard Dawkins |
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33b7ad9
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Can omniscient God, who Knows the future, find The omnipotence to Change His future mind?
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Richard Dawkins |
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31b07c8
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Prediction in a complex world is a chancy business. Every decision that a survival machine takes is a gamble, and it is the business of genes to program brains in advance so that on average they take decisions that pay off. The currency used in the casino of evolution is survival, strictly gene survival, but for many purposes individual survival is a reasonable approximation.
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science
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Richard Dawkins |
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0bee3e0
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The fact that it has nothing else to contribute to human wisdom is no reason to hand religion a free licence to tell us what to do. Which religion, anyway? The one in which we happen to have been brought up? To which chapter, then, of which book of the Bible should we turn--for they are far from unanimous and some of them are odious by any reasonable standards. How many literalists have read enough of the Bible to know that the death penalt..
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religion
theology
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Richard Dawkins |
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2632f8c
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ykh nmwnh an prssh flsfy qdymy st khh mygwyd: ay tw hm mthl mn qrmz mybyny? shyd anchh bry tw qrmz mynmyd bry mn sbz bshyd y Slan rngy bshd khh dr khyl mn hm nmygnjd! fylswfn yn prssh r dr zmrh prsshhyy mydnnd khh hrgz pskhy ndrd.
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Richard Dawkins |
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eca6f2f
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Relatives share a substantial proportion of their genes. Each selfish gene therefore has its loyalties divided between different bodies.
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Richard Dawkins |
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d3da1de
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My main reason for scepticism about the Huxley/Sagan theory is that the human brain is demonstrably eager to see faces in random patterns, as we know from scientific evidence, on top of the numerous legends about faces of Jesus, or the Virgin Mary, or Mother Teresa, being seen on slices of toast, or pizzas, or patches of damp on a wall. This eagerness is enhanced if the pattern departs from randomness in the specific direction of being symm..
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evidence
evolution
religion
science
sir-julian-huxley
theory
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Richard Dawkins |
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750f7f6
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If this dysfunctional family was the best Sodom had to offer by way of morals, some might begin to feel a certain sympathy with God and his judicial brimstone.
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religion
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Richard Dawkins |
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5b09b87
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If superior creatures from space ever visit earth, the first question they will ask, in order to assess the level of our civilization, is: 'Have they discovered evolution yet?
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Richard Dawkins |
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99ce82c
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I speculate that we shall come to accept the more radical idea that each one of our genes is a symbiotic unit. We are gigantic colonies of symbiotic genes.
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symbiosis
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Richard Dawkins |
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598ffc9
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I prefer to say that I believe in people, and people, when given the right encouragement to think for themselves about all the information now available, very often turn out not to believe in God and to lead fulfilled and satisfied--indeed, liberated--lives.
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Richard Dawkins |
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be1fa22
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In a designed economy there would be no trees, or certainly no very tall trees: no forests, no canopy. Trees are a waste. Trees are extravagant. Tree trunks are standing monuments to futile competition - futile if we think in terms of a planed economy. But the natural economy is not planned. Individual plants compete with other plants, of the same and other species, and the result is that they grow taller and taller, far taller than any pla..
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science
trees
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Richard Dawkins |
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5bded49
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A deep understanding of Darwinism teaches us to be wary of the easy assumption that design is the only alternative to chance
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science
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Richard Dawkins |
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190cc9e
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Less abject but more shocking was the letter from the Founder of the Calvary Tabernacle Association in Oklahoma: Professor Einstein, I believe that every Christian in America will answer you, 'We will not give up our belief in our God and his son Jesus Christ, but we invite you, if you do not believe in the God of the people of this nation, to go back where you came from.' I have done everything in my power to be a blessing to Israel, and t..
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Richard Dawkins |
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5ad3abd
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Darwinism is not a theory of random chance. It is a theory of random mutation plus non-random cumulative natural selection. . . . Natural selection . . . is a non-random force, pushing towards improvement. . . . Every generation has its Darwinian failures but every individual is descended only from previous generations' successful minorities. . . . [T]here can be no going downhill - species can't get worse as a prelude to getting better. . ..
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Richard Dawkins |
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ff1ad3d
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When we die there are two things we can leave behind us: genes and memes. We were built as gene machines, created to pass on our genes. But that aspect of us will be forgotten in three generations. Your child, even your grandchild, may bear a resemblance to you, perhaps in facial features, in a talent for music, in the colour of her hair. But as each generation passes, the contribution of your genes is halved. It does not take long to reach..
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Richard Dawkins |
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ccc82e8
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I am not trying to make a point by telling stories. Chosen examples are never serious evidence for any worthwhile generalization.
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Richard Dawkins |
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ee0ade1
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God likes to have his free lunch and be it too.
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Richard Dawkins |
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2d64014
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The mob hysteria over pedophiles has reached epidemic proportions and driven parents to panic. Today's Just Williams, today's Huck Finns, today's Swallows and Amazons are deprived of the freedom to roam that was one of the delights of childhood in earlier times (when the actual, as opposed to the perceived, risk of molestation was probably no less).
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Richard Dawkins |
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b64200f
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It would be so nice if those who oppose evolution would take a tiny bit of trouble to learn the merest rudiments of what it is that they are opposing.
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Richard Dawkins |
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3bdb6b3
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Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
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Richard Dawkins |
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4eebe98
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hmhchyz r bsnj; hmwrh bwrhy khwd r b wq`yt bz azm, w amdhbsh t Hty `zyztryn bwrhyt r hm khh b wq`yt nmykhwnnd khnr nhy. `qyd khwd r mstqlan w br mbny khrd w tjrbhy khwd brgzyn; ngdhr dygrn tw r bh pyrwy khwrkhwrnh bkhshnnd.
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Richard Dawkins |
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29bbf3d
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To say that something happened supernaturally is not just to say 'We don't understand it' but to say 'We will never understand it, so don't even try.
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Richard Dawkins |
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582e59a
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What, after all, is so special about genes? The answer is that they are replicators. The laws of physics are supposed to be true all over the accessible universe. Are there any principles of biology which are likely to have similar universal validity? When astronauts voyage to distant planets and look for life, they can expect to find creatures too strange and unearthly for us to imagine. But is there anything which must be true of all life..
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evolution
life
science
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Richard Dawkins |
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0e0980f
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one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.
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Richard Dawkins |
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eadf172
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Another curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it!
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Richard Dawkins |
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524f805
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God ordered Abraham to make a burnt offering of his longed-for son. Abraham built an altar, put firewood upon it, and trussed Isaac up on top of the wood. His murdering knife was already in his hand when an angel dramatically intervened with the news of a last-minute change of plan: God was only joking after all, 'tempting' Abraham, and testing his faith. A modern moralist cannot help but wonder how a child could ever recover from such a ps..
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Richard Dawkins |
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435d7f5
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Oxygen flooded into the atmosphere as a pollutant, even a poison, until natural selection shaped living things to thrive on the stuff and, indeed, suffocate without it.
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life
natural-selection
oxygen
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Richard Dawkins |
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47dd52f
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Which of our unnoticed isms will the hindsight of future generations condemn?
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Richard Dawkins |
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edfdc03
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In the case of living machinery, the 'designer' is unconscious natural selection, the blind watchmaker.
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Richard Dawkins |
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889d7a8
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Anyone can popularize science if he oversimplifies.
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Richard Dawkins |
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0c2b4ce
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The fact that something is written down is persuasive to people not used to asking questions like: 'Who wrote it, and when?' 'How did they know what to write?' 'Did they, in their time, really mean what we, in our time, understand them to be saying?' 'Were they unbiased observers, or did they have an agenda that coloured their writing?
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Richard Dawkins |