“The earliest form of natural selection was simply a selection of stable forms and a rejection of unstable ones. There is no… — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
“The point of the prey being paralysed rather than killed, by the way, is that they don't decay but are eaten alive… — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
“Evolution by natural selection is the explanation for why we exist. It is not something to guide our lives in our own… — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
Mutation is random; natural selection is the very opposite of random. — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
“But the very fact that Darwinism is true makes it even more important for us to fight against the naturally selfish and… — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
“In giving rise to man, the evolutionary process has, apparently for the first and only time in the history of the Cosmos,… — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation forthe existence and apparently… — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
“The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes… — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
For me, the level at which natural selection causes the phenomenon of adaptation is the level of the replicator - the gene. — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
“A deep understanding of Darwinism teaches us to be wary of the easy assumption that design is the only alternative to chance” — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is… — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
“Darwin singled out the eye as posing a particularly challenging problem: 'To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for… — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
As Darwin himself was at pains to point out, natural selection is all about differential survival within species, not between them. — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
“How did ears get their start? Any piece of skin can detect vibrations if they come in contact with vibrating objects. This… — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
If there are other worlds elsewhere in the universe, I would conjecture they are governed by the same laws of natural selection. — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
“Natural selection builds child brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and tribal elders tell them. Such trusting obedience is… — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
“Oxygen flooded into the atmosphere as a pollutant, even a poison, until natural selection shaped living things to thrive on the stuff… — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
“...natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and… — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
My eyes are constantly wide open to the extraordinary fact of existence. Not just human existence, but the existence of life and… — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
“Natural selection is not only a parsimonious, plausible and elegant solution; it is the only workable alternative to chance that has ever… — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
Natural selection will not remove ignorance from future generations. — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
At the deepest level, all living things that have ever been looked at have the same DNA code. And many of the same genes. — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
The word 'mundane' has come to mean 'boring' and 'dull', and it really shouldn't - it should mean the opposite. Because it comes from… — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
“The fundamentalist Kurt Wise proclaims that all the evidence in the universe would not change his mind. The true scientist, however passionately he may… — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
“I have found it an amusing strategy, when asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that the questioner is also an atheist… — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
Religions do make claims about the universe--the same kinds of claims that scientists make, except they're usually false. — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
“much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents,… — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
The recurrent laryngeal nerve - which runs from the head to the voice box - goes all the way down into the chest, loops… — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
The Roman Catholic Church is an institution for whose gains the phrase "ill-gotten" might have been specially invented. And of all its money-making rip-offs,… — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs. — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
What's going to happen when I die? I may be buried, or I may be cremated, I may give my body to science. I… — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
Or why it is acceptable to train fast runners and high jumpers but not to breed them. I can think of some answers, and… — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
