“Natural selection is a beguiling counterfeiter of deliberate purpose.” — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
“A gene is defined as any portion of chromosomal material that potentially lasts for enough generations to serve as a unit of… — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
“In the case of living machinery, the ‘designer’ is unconscious natural selection, the blind watchmaker.” — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
The rule of thumb based into the brain by natural selection would not have been, Be nice to your kin and be… — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
Blindness to suffering is an inherent consequence of natural selection. Nature is neither kind nor cruel but indifferent. — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
“Selection has favoured genes that cooperate with others. In the fierce competition for scarce resources, in the relentless struggle to eat other… — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
Time and again, my sociobiological colleagues have upbraided me as a turncoat, because I will not agree with them that the ultimate… — 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. . .… — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in view.… — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
Natural selection is all about the differential success of rival DNA in getting itself transmitted vertically in the species archives. — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
“Our consciousness is also raised by the cruelty and wastefulness of natural selection. Predators seem beautifully ‘designed’ to catch prey animals, while… — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
“If a group of atoms in the presence of energy falls into a stable pattern it will tend to stay that way.… — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
In true natural selection, if a body has what it takes to survive, its genes automatically survive because they are inside it.… — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
Suffering is a byproduct of evolution by natural selection, an inevitable consequence that may worry us in our more sympathetic moments but… — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining… — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
There is economics in biology, nothing is free, everything has to be paid for, there are costs as well as benefits to… — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
“It is a strange fact, incidentally, that religious apologists love the anthropic principle. For some reason that makes no sense at all,… — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
“There was something built into the human brain by natural selection which was once useful, and which now manifests itself as religion.” — Richard Dawkins Copy Share Image
We should learn to understand natural selection, so that we can oppose any tendency to apply it to human politics. — 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
