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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.
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Science Quotes by Richard Dawkins (35 quotes)
>> Click for Richard Dawkins Quotes on | DNA | Evolution | Gene | Life |
>> Click for Richard Dawkins Quotes on | DNA | Evolution | Gene | Life |
'[R]eductionism' is one of those things, like sin, that is only mentioned by people who are against it. To call oneself a reductionist will sound, in some circles, a bit like admitting to eating babies. But, just as nobody actually eats babies, so nobody is really a reductionist in any sense worth being against.
— Richard Dawkins
The Blind Watchmaker (1996), 13.
A formative influence on my undergraduate self was the response of a respected elder statesmen of the Oxford Zoology Department when an American visitor had just publicly disproved his favourite theory. The old man strode to the front of the lecture hall, shook the American warmly by the hand and declared in ringing, emotional tones: ‘My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years.’ And we clapped our hands red. Can you imagine a Government Minister being cheered in the House of Commons for a similar admission? “Resign, Resign” is a much more likely response!
— Richard Dawkins
…...
All appearances to the contrary, the only watchmaker in nature is the blind forces of physics, albeit deployed in very special way. A true watchmaker has foresight: he designs his cogs springs, and plans their interconnections, with a future purpose in his mind's eye. Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind's eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.
— Richard Dawkins
The Blind Watchmaker (1986), 5.
As a scientist, I am hostile to fundamentalist religion because it actively debauches the scientific enterprise. It teaches us not to change our minds, and not to want to know exciting things that are available to be known. It subverts science and saps the intellect.
— Richard Dawkins
In The God Delusion (2007), 321. As cited in John C. Weaver and John David Weaver, Christianity and Science (1973, 1984), 22.
But, however many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead, or rather not alive.
— Richard Dawkins
The Blind Watchmaker (1996), 9.
Cheetah genes cooperate with cheetah genes but not with camel genes, and vice versa. This is not because cheetah genes, even in the most poetic sense, see any virtue in the preservation of the cheetah species. They are not working to save the cheetah from extinction like some molecular World Wildlife Fund.
— Richard Dawkins
From Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion, and the Appetite for Wonder (1998), 218.
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.
Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distance target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection, although human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.
— Richard Dawkins
The Blind Watchmaker (1996), 50.
Five per cent vision is better than no vision at all. Five per cent hearing is better than no hearing at all. Five per cent flight efficiency is better than no flight at all. It is thoroughly believable that every organ or apparatus that we actually see is the product of a smooth trajectory through animal space, a trajectory in which every intermediate stage assisted survival and reproduction.
[Rebutting the Creationist assertion that fully developed organs could not have arisen 'by chance.']
[Rebutting the Creationist assertion that fully developed organs could not have arisen 'by chance.']
— Richard Dawkins
The Blind Watchmaker (1986, 1996) 90-91.
I do not subscribe to the “’Exploding Custard” kind of science communication.
— Richard Dawkins
Professor of Public Understanding of Science, Oxford University, speaking at the British Association Annual Festival of Science, at Leeds University in 1997.
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.
— Richard Dawkins
The Blind Watchmaker (1996), 51.
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.
— Richard Dawkins
The Blind Watchmaker (1996), 57
Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence.
— Richard Dawkins
The Selfish Gene (1976), 1.
It is grindingly, creakingly, crashingly obvious that, if Darwinism were really a theory of chance, it couldn’t work. You don't need to be a mathematician or physicist to calculate that an eye or a haemoglobin molecule would take from here to infinity to self-assemble by sheer higgledy-piggledy luck. Far from being a difficulty peculiar to Darwinism, the astronomic improbability of eyes and knees, enzymes and elbow joints and all the other living wonders is precisely the problem that any theory of life must solve, and that Darwinism uniquely does solve. It solves it by breaking the improbability up into small, manageable parts, smearing out the luck needed, going round the back of Mount Improbable and crawling up the gentle slopes, inch by million-year inch. Only God would essay the mad task of leaping up the precipice in a single bound.
— Richard Dawkins
In Climbing Mount Improbable (1996), 67-8.
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.
Mutation is random; natural selection is the very opposite of random
— Richard Dawkins
The Blind Watchmaker (1996), 41
Nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous—indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.
— Richard Dawkins
River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (1995), 112.
Part of the appeal was that Medawar was not only a Nobel Laureate, but he seemed like a Nobel Laureate; he was everything one thought a Nobel Laureate ought to be. If you have ever wondered why scientists like Popper, try Medawar's exposition. Actually most Popperian scientists have probably never tried reading anything but Medawar's exposition.
— Richard Dawkins
'The Art of the Developable', New York Review of Books (Oct 1983). The first two sentences, slightly edited, were reprinted in A Devil's Chaplain (2004), 196.
Reductionism is a dirty word, and a kind of 'holistier than thou' self-righteousness has become fashionable.
— Richard Dawkins
The Extended Phenotype: The Gene as the Selection (1982), 113.
Religion shows a pattern of heredity which I think is similar to genetic heredity. ... There are hundreds of different religious sects, and every religious person is loyal to just one of these. ... The overwhelming majority just happen to choose the one their parents belonged to. Not the sect that has the best evidence in its favour, the best miracles, the best moral code, the best cathedral, the best stained-glass, the best music when it comes to choosing from the smorgasbord of available religions, their potential virtues seem to count for nothing compared to the matter of heredity.
— Richard Dawkins
From edited version of a speech, at the Edinburgh International Science Festival (15 Apr 1992), as reprinted from the Independent newspaper in Alec Fisher, The Logic of Real Arguments (2004), 82-83.
Religious people split into three main groups when faced with science. I shall label them the ‘know-nothings’, the ‘know-alls’, and the ‘no-contests’.
— Richard Dawkins
…...
Scientific rationalism is the crowning glory of the human spirit.
— Richard Dawkins
The Guardian (17 May 2000)
The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale.
— Richard Dawkins
In The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design (1986), 317.
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.
The more you understand the significance of evolution, the more you are pushed away from the agnostic position and towards atheism. Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things.
— Richard Dawkins
From edited version of a speech, at the Edinburgh International Science Festival (15 Apr 1992), as reprinted from the Independent newspaper in Alec Fisher, The Logic of Real Arguments (2004), 84.
The physicist’s problem is the problem of ultimate origins and ultimate natural laws. The biologist's problem is the problem of complexity.
— Richard Dawkins
In The Blind Watchmaker (1996), 15.
The present lack of a definitely acceptable account of the origin of life should certainly not be taken as a stumbling block for the whole Darwinian world view.
— Richard Dawkins
In The Blind Watchmaker (1991), 166.
There is a popular cliché ... which says that you cannot get out of computers any more than you have put in..., that computers can only do exactly what you tell them to, and that therefore computers are never creative. This cliché is true only in a crashingly trivial sense, the same sense in which Shakespeare never wrote anything except what his first schoolteacher taught him to write—words.
— Richard Dawkins
In The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design (1966, 1986), 64. Excerpted in Richard Dawkins, ‘Creation and Natural Selection’. New Scientist (25 Sep 1986), 111, 38.
We animals are the most complicated things in the known universe.
— Richard Dawkins
The Blind Watchmaker (1986), 1.
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.
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.
— Richard Dawkins
From Preface to The Selfish Gene (1976, 2006), xxi.
We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. 'Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene'. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to 'memory', or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with 'cream'.
— Richard Dawkins
In The Selfish Gene (1976).
[O]ur own existence once presented the greatest of all mysteries, but … it is a mystery no longer because it is solved. Darwin and Wallace solved it … I was surprised that so many people seemed not only unaware of the elegant and beautiful solution to this deepest of problems but, incredibly, in many cases actually unaware that there was a problem in the first place!
— Richard Dawkins
The Blind Watchmaker (1996), front matter.
[Richard Leakey is] a robust hero of a man, who actually lives up to the cliché, “a big man in every sense of the word.” Like other big men he is loved by many, feared by some, and not over-preoccupied with the judgments of any.
— Richard Dawkins
The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing (2008), 190.
Quotes by others about Richard Dawkins (1)
When Richard Dawkins first published his idea of a meme, he made it clear he was speaking of “a unit of imitation” … Memes were supposed to be exclusive triumphs of humanity. But memes come in two different kinds—behavioral and verbal. … behavioral memes began brain-hopping long before there were such things as human minds.
In 'Threading a New Tapestry', Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000), 62.
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.