Natural selection Quotes by Richard Dawkins

“Natural selection is a beguiling counterfeiter of deliberate purpose.”

— Richard Dawkins

Natural selection will not remove ignorance from future generations.

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

Natural selection is anything but random.

— Richard Dawkins

As Darwin himself was at pains to point out, natural selection is all about differential survival within species, not between them.

— Richard Dawkins

“A deep understanding of Darwinism teaches us to be wary of the easy assumption that design is the only alternative to chance”

— Richard Dawkins

Blindness to suffering is an inherent consequence of natural selection. Nature is neither kind nor cruel but indifferent.

— Richard Dawkins

We should learn to understand natural selection, so that we can oppose any tendency to apply it to human politics.

— Richard Dawkins

Natural selection is all about the differential success of rival DNA in getting itself transmitted vertically in the species archives.

— Richard Dawkins

If there are other worlds elsewhere in the universe, I would conjecture they are governed by the same laws of natural selection.

— Richard Dawkins

For me, the level at which natural selection causes the phenomenon of adaptation is the level of the replicator - the gene.

— Richard Dawkins

“In the case of living machinery, the ‘designer’ is unconscious natural selection, the blind watchmaker.”

— Richard Dawkins

My eyes are constantly wide open to the extraordinary fact of existence. Not just human existence, but the existence of life and…

— Richard Dawkins

Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in view.…

— Richard Dawkins

In true natural selection, if a body has what it takes to survive, its genes automatically survive because they are inside it.…

— Richard Dawkins

The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining…

— Richard Dawkins

Suffering is a byproduct of evolution by natural selection, an inevitable consequence that may worry us in our more sympathetic moments but…

— Richard Dawkins

Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is…

— Richard Dawkins

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

— Richard Dawkins

The rule of thumb based into the brain by natural selection would not have been, Be nice to your kin and be…

— Richard Dawkins

“How did ears get their start? Any piece of skin can detect vibrations if they come in contact with vibrating objects. This…

— Richard Dawkins

Time and again, my sociobiological colleagues have upbraided me as a turncoat, because I will not agree with them that the ultimate…

— Richard Dawkins

“Natural selection builds child brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and tribal elders tell them. Such trusting obedience is…

— Richard Dawkins

Nowadays theologians aren't quite so straightforward as Paley. They don't point to complex living mechanisms and say that they are self-evidently designed…

— Richard Dawkins

There is economics in biology, nothing is free, everything has to be paid for, there are costs as well as benefits to…

— 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

Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation forthe existence and apparently…

— Richard Dawkins

“Natural selection is not only a parsimonious, plausible and elegant solution; it is the only workable alternative to chance that has ever…

— Richard Dawkins

“Evolution by natural selection is the explanation for why we exist. It is not something to guide our lives in our own…

— Richard Dawkins

“In giving rise to man, the evolutionary process has, apparently for the first and only time in the history of the Cosmos,…

— 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

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

— Richard Dawkins

“There was something built into the human brain by natural selection which was once useful, and which now manifests itself as religion.”

— Richard Dawkins

“A gene is defined as any portion of chromosomal material that potentially lasts for enough generations to serve as a unit of…

— Richard Dawkins

“The earliest form of natural selection was simply a selection of stable forms and a rejection of unstable ones. There is no…

— 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

People will say, "You're never going to convince me that something as complicated as an eye could come about by sheer chance."…

— 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

“senile decay is simply a by-product of the accumulation in the gene pool of late-acting lethal and semi-lethal genes, which have been…

— Richard Dawkins