(source)
|
Richard Dawkins
(26 Mar 1941 - )
English evolutionary biologist and science writer known for his outspoken opinions as an atheist on creationism. He wrote the best-selling The Selfish Gene, his reformulation of the theory of natural selection.
|
Richard Dawkins Quotes on DNA (5 quotes)
>> Click for 48 Science Quotes by Richard Dawkins
>> Click for Richard Dawkins Quotes on | Evolution | Gene | Life |
>> Click for 48 Science Quotes by Richard Dawkins
>> Click for Richard Dawkins Quotes on | Evolution | Gene | Life |
DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.
— Richard Dawkins
River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life(1995), 133.
It is raining DNA outside. On the bank of the Oxford canal at the bottom of my garden is a large willow tree, and it is pumping downy seeds into the air. ... [spreading] DNA whose coded characters spell out specific instructions for building willow trees that will shed a new generation of downy seeds. … It is raining instructions out there; it’s raining programs; it’s raining tree-growing, fluff-spreading, algorithms. That is not a metaphor, it is the plain truth. It couldn’t be any plainer if it were raining floppy discs.
— Richard Dawkins
The Blind Watchmaker (1986), 111.
The messages that DNA molecules contain are all but eternal when seen against the time scale of individual lifetimes. The lifetimes of DNA messages (give or take a few mutations) are measured in units ranging from millions of years to hundreds of millions of years; or, in other words, ranging from 10,000 individual lifetimes to a trillion individual lifetimes. Each individual organism should be seen as a temporary vehicle, in which DNA messages spend a tiny fraction of their geological lifetimes.
— Richard Dawkins
The Blind Watchmaker (1996), 126.
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
Unweaving the Rainbow (1998), 1.
We are machines built by DNA whose purpose is to make more copies of the same DNA. ... This is exactly what we are for. We are machines for propagating DNA, and the propagation of DNA is a self-sustaining process. It is every living object's sole reason for living.
— Richard Dawkins
Royal Institution Christmas Lecture, 'The Ultraviolet Garden', (No. 4, 1991). Quoted in Vinoth Ramachandra, Subverting Global Myths: Theology and the Public Issues Shaping our World (2008), 187.
See also:
- 26 Mar - short biography, births, deaths and events on date of Dawkins's birth.
- The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition, by Richard Dawkins. - book suggestion.
- Booklist for Richard Dawkins.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
