Richard Dawkins: Trending quotes (page 11)

Richard Dawkins trending quotes. Read the latest quotes in collection
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“… it is certainly wrong to condemn poor old Homo Sapiens as the only species to kill his own kind, the only inheritor of the mark of Cain, and similar melodramatic charges.”

Richard Dawkins book The Selfish Gene

Source: The Selfish Gene (1976, 1989), Ch. 5. Aggression: stability and the selfish machine

“The popularity of the paranormal, oddly enough, might even be grounds for encouragement. I think that the appetite for mystery, the enthusiasm for that which we do not understand, is healthy and to be fostered. It is the same appetite which drives the best of true science, and it is an appetite which true science is best qualified to satisfy.”

Richard Dawkins

The Richard Dimbleby Lecture: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder (1996)

Understanding , Thinking , Science

“… 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 book The Selfish Gene

Source: The Selfish Gene (1976, 1989), Ch. 6. Genesmanship

Appearance , Selfishness

“… 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

River out of Eden (1995)

Life , World , Nature

“With respect to those meanings of "human" that are relevant to the morality of abortion, any fetus is less human than an adult pig.”

Richard Dawkins

https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/311774201012948992 (13 March 2013)
Twitter

“Don't call him "clock boy" since he never made a clock. Hoax Boy, having hoaxed his way into the White House, now wants $15M in addition!”

Richard Dawkins

@RichardDawkins https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/669098728662409216 ()
Regarding the Ahmed Mohamed clock incident.
Twitter

Way , Boy , Housing

“… leaders who forbid their followers to use effective contraceptive methods … 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 book The Selfish Gene

Source: The Selfish Gene (1976, 1989), Ch. 7. Family planning

Nature

“… you need more than luck to navigate successfully through a thousand sieves in succession.”

Richard Dawkins

River out of Eden (1995)

Success

“It is even possible to mount a serious, though not widely supported, historical case that Jesus never lived at all … Although Jesus probably existed, reputable biblical scholars do not in general regard the New Testament (and obviously not the Old Testament) as reliable record of what actually happened in history, and I shall not consider the Bible further evidence for any kind of deity.”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

Source: The God Delusion (2006), p. 122

History , Support

“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

The Evolutionary Future of Man (1993)

World

“Three imaginary readers looked over my shoulder while I was writing, and I now dedicate the book to them. […] First the general reader, the layman […] second the expert [and] third the student.”

Richard Dawkins book The Selfish Gene

Preface
The Selfish Gene (1976, 1989)

Books

“Those people who think sexual abuse is a black-or-white, all-or-none category are incapable of clear, logical thought.”

Richard Dawkins

https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/282854320133775360
Twitter

People , Thinking

“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

River out of Eden (1995)

Life

“The wheel may be one of those cases where the engineering solution can be seen in plain view, yet be unattainable in evolution because it lies [on] the other side of a deep valley, cutting unbridgeably across the massif of Mount Improbable.”

Richard Dawkins

[Dawkins, Richard, Richard Dawkins, Why don't animals have wheels?, Sunday Times, November 24, 1996, http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins-archive/Dawkins/Work/Articles/1996-11-24wheels.shtml, October 29, 2008, http://web.archive.org/web/20070221073440/http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins-archive/Dawkins/Work/Articles/1996-11-24wheels.shtml, February 21, 2007]

“The second requirement of a virus-friendly environment – that it should obey a program of coded instructions – is again only quantitatively less true for brains than for cells or computers. We sometimes obey orders from one another, but also we sometimes don't. Nevertheless, it is a telling fact that, the world over, the vast majority of children follow the religion of their parents rather than any of the other available religions. Instructions to genuflect, to bow towards Mecca, to nod one's head rhythmically towards the wall, to shake like a maniac, to "speak in tongues" – the list of such arbitrary and pointless motor patterns offered by religion alone is extensive – are obeyed, if not slavishly, at least with some reasonably high statistical probability.”

Richard Dawkins book Viruses of the Mind

Viruses of the Mind (1993)

Children , World , Religion , Parent

“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

The Richard Dimbleby Lecture: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder (1996)

Way , Science

“… 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

Darwin's Dangerous Disciple: An Interview by Frank Miele (1995)

War , Nature

“The absolute morality that the religious person might profess would include what, stoning people for adultery, death for apostasy, punishment for breaking the Sabbath; these are all things which are religiously based absolute moralities. I don’t think I want an absolute morality. I think I want a morality that is thought-out, reasoned, argued, discussed—based upon, almost say—intelligent design. Can we not design our society which has the sort of morality, the sort of society we want to live in?”

Richard Dawkins

Dawkins on Q&A (), replying to a Muslim man who asked about 'absolute morality'. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mu7AQTs_y5A

Death , People , Intelligence , Thinking

“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

River out of Eden (1995)

“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

The Evolutionary Future of Man (1993)

Time