Richard Dawkins: Trending quotes (page 6)

Richard Dawkins trending quotes. Read the latest quotes in collection
Richard Dawkins: 644   quotes 32   likes

“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

The Evolutionary Future of Man (1993)

Animals , Speed

“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”

Richard Dawkins book The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution

Source: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (2009), p. 164

“I'm told theology is outside my field of expertise. But is theology a "field" at all? Is there anything in "theology" to be expert ABOUT?”

Richard Dawkins

https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/324171554491596803 (16 April 2013)
Twitter

“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 book The Selfish Gene

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

Children

“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

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

Imagination , Understanding , Science

“There are people in the world who desperately want not to have to believe in Darwinism.”

Richard Dawkins book The Blind Watchmaker

Source: The Blind Watchmaker (1986), Chapter 9 “Puncturing Punctuationism” (p. 250)

People , World

“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.”

Richard Dawkins

Steve Paulson, "The flying spaghetti monster" http://www.salon.com/books/int/2006/10/13/dawkins/index3.html (), Salon.com

Religion , Science

“Admittedly, people of a theological bent are often chronically incapable of distinguishing what is true from what they'd like to be true. (p. 135 of the Black Swan paperback edition of 2007)”

Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion

The God Delusion (2006)

People

“Some states, e. g. "pregnant", are all-or-none, no intermediates. But sexual abuse has shades of grey, from violent buggery to mild touching.”

Richard Dawkins

https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/282850316377014272
Twitter

“There is more than just grandeur in this view of life, bleak and cold though it can seem from under the security blanket of ignorance. There is deep refreshment to be had from standing up and facing straight into the strong keen wind of understanding: Yeats's 'Winds that blow through the starry ways.”

Richard Dawkins book A Devil's Chaplain

Compare: "Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigour, and the great spaces have a splendour of their own." Bertrand Russell, What I Believe (1925)
A Devil's Chaplain (2003)

Life , Way , Understanding , Strong

“You see, if you say something positive like the whole of life – all living things – is descended from a single common ancestor which lived about 4,000 million years ago and that we are all cousins, well that is an exceedingly important and true thing to say and that is what I want to say. Somebody who is religious sees that as threatening and so I am represented as attacking religion, and I am forced into responding to their reaction. But you do not have to see my main purpose as attacking religion. Certainly I see the scientific view of the world as incompatible with religion, but that is not what is interesting about it. It is also incompatible with magic, but that also is not worth stressing. What is interesting about the scientific world view is that it is true, inspiring, remarkable and that it unites a whole lot of phenomena under a single heading. And that is what is so exciting for me.”

Richard Dawkins

[1995-04-28, Kam Patel, Going the whole hog, Times Higher Education, http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=97718&sectioncode=26]

Life , World , Religion

“Of course politics are important — Iraq, Palestine, even social deprivation in Bradford. But as we wake up to this huge challenge to our civilised values, don't let's forget the elephant in the room — an elephant called "religion."”

Richard Dawkins

Part 1, 00:00:24
The Root of All Evil? (January 2006)

Religion , Parting , Forgetting

“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 book The Blind Watchmaker

Source: The Blind Watchmaker (1986), Chapter 11 “Doomed Rivals” (p. 288)

Books

“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

An Interview by Sheena McDonald (1995)

Life , Music , Understanding , Help

“The idea that ancient equal years of accumulated wisdom is a fallacy. […] In medicine, 'ancient' also means developed before we understood the causes of disease, before germ theory. It was based on ignorance then and age makes it no truer. We misguidedly look back to a golden age that never was; ours is the golden age of safe tested medicine, effective beyond placebo, in which we've cut infant mortality and conquered diseases, then forgotten they existed.”

Richard Dawkins

The Enemies of Reason, "The Irrational Health Service"
The Enemies of Reason (August 2007)

Wisdom , Age , Disease , Idea

“The human mind is a wanton storyteller and even more, a profligate seeker after pattern. We see faces in clouds and tortillas, fortunes in tea leaves and planetary movements. It is quite difficult to prove a real pattern as distinct from a superficial illusion.”

Richard Dawkins book A Devil's Chaplain

"Snake Oil"
A Devil's Chaplain (2003)

Tea

“University is about confronting new ideas, unfamiliar, un-"safe". If you want to be "safe" you are not worthy of a university education.”

Richard Dawkins

https://twitter.com/richarddawkins/status/590953689826914305 (22 April 2015)
Twitter

Education , Idea , Universe

“I was reminded of a quotation by the famous American physicist Steven Weinberg, Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist. Weinberg said: "Religion is an insult to human dignity. Without it, you'd have good people doing good things, and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion."”

Richard Dawkins

Part 2, 00:35:01
The Root of All Evil? (January 2006)

People , Religion , Evil , Parting

“To label people as death-deserving enemies because of disagreements about real world politics is bad enough. To do the same for disagreements about a delusional world inhabited by archangels, demons and imaginary friends is ludicrously tragic.”

Richard Dawkins book A Devil's Chaplain

"Time to Stand Up"
A Devil's Chaplain (2003)

Death , People , World