Evolution Quotes by Richard Dawkins

I am not advocating a morality based on evolution.

— Richard Dawkins

We have a huge amount of DNA in common with jellyfish.

— Richard Dawkins

Human beings are just gene machines.

— Richard Dawkins

Natural selection is anything but random.

— Richard Dawkins

I can handle heckling on evolution because it's my own field.

— Richard Dawkins

“My purpose is to examine the biology of selfishness and altruism.”

— Richard Dawkins

Evolution never looks to the future.

— Richard Dawkins

Islands are natural workshops of evolution.

— Richard Dawkins

“They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.”

— Richard Dawkins

Mutation is random; natural selection is the very opposite of random.

— Richard Dawkins

My personal feeling is that understanding evolution led me to atheism.

— Richard Dawkins

Beliefs. Once entrenched in a culture, they persist, evolve and diverge, in a manner reminiscent of biological evolution.

— Richard Dawkins

Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators. The watchmaker is blind

— Richard Dawkins

There is a tendency for people to say evolution is only a theory. That is inappropriate.

— Richard Dawkins

Faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.

— Richard Dawkins

Evolution is just a theory? Well, so is gravity and I don't see you jumping out of buildings.

— Richard Dawkins

“In the world of the extended phenotype, ask not how an animal's behaviour benefits its genes; ask instead whose genes it is…

— Richard Dawkins

You cannot be both sane and well educated and disbelieve in evolution. The evidence is so strong that any sane, educated person…

— Richard Dawkins

They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence.…

— Richard Dawkins

If it suits [God] to be a deity that we must seek without being forced to, would it not have been sensible…

— Richard Dawkins

What really happens is that the gene pool becomes filled with genes that influence bodies in such a way that they behave…

— Richard Dawkins

When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly half way between. It…

— Richard Dawkins

Why did humans lose their body hair? Why did they start walking on their hind legs? Why did they develop big brains?…

— Richard Dawkins

“The more statistically improbable a thing is, the less we can believe it just happened by blind chance...the obvious alternative to chance…

— Richard Dawkins

“A biochemist colleague has kindly provided me with a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, and enough hydroquinone for 50 bombardier beetles, I am…

— Richard Dawkins

It is quite true that many scientists, many physicists, maintain that the physical constants, the half dozen or so numbers that physicists…

— Richard Dawkins

“Selection has favoured genes that cooperate with others. In the fierce competition for scarce resources, in the relentless struggle to eat other…

— Richard Dawkins

“Darwinism is not a theory of random chance. It is a theory of random mutation plus non-random cumulative natural selection. . .…

— Richard Dawkins

“But the very fact that Darwinism is true makes it even more important for us to fight against the naturally selfish and…

— Richard Dawkins

Molecular genetics can show off some surprising relationships like, for example, the close relationship of whales to hippopotamuses, which I think nobody…

— Richard Dawkins

“...natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and…

— Richard Dawkins

Hence, at the moment of the creation of the universe, God could also have activated evolution, with full knowledge of how it…

— Richard Dawkins

If we want to postulate a deity capable of engineering all the organized complexity in the world, either instantaneously or by guiding…

— Richard Dawkins

“The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes…

— Richard Dawkins

“Was there to be any end to the gradual improvement in the techniques and artifices used by the replicators to ensure their…

— Richard Dawkins

“A tiger's DNA is also a 'duplicate me' program but it contains an almost fantastically large digression as an essential part of…

— Richard Dawkins

“Darwin singled out the eye as posing a particularly challenging problem: 'To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for…

— Richard Dawkins

“If a group of atoms in the presence of energy falls into a stable pattern it will tend to stay that way.…

— Richard Dawkins

I think we have got to start again and go right back to first principles. The argument I shall advance, surprising as…

— Richard Dawkins

“Different sorts of survival machine appear very varied on the outside and in their internal organs. An octopus is nothing like a…

— Richard Dawkins