« All Natural Quotes · Richard Dawkins's Page
Natural Quotes by Richard Dawkins
- Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in view. Yet the living…
- We should learn to understand natural selection, so that we can oppose any tendency to apply it to human politics.
- I doubt that religion can survive deep understanding. The shallows are its natural habitat. Cranks and fundamentalists are too often victimised as scapegoats for religion…
- There is economics in biology, nothing is free, everything has to be paid for, there are costs as well as benefits to everything in life,…
- We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realise that we are apes. Our common ancestor with the chimpanzees and gorillas is much…
- 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…
- Suffering is a byproduct of evolution by natural selection, an inevitable consequence that may worry us in our more sympathetic moments but cannot be expected…
- The physicist's problem is the problem of ultimate origins and ultimate natural laws. The biologist's problem is the problem of complexity.
- Mutation is random; natural selection is the very opposite of random.
- Natural selection is anything but random.
- The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of…
- Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is explained by a…
- ...there are no natural borderlines in evolution. The illusion of a borderline is created by the fact that the evolutionary intermediates happen to be extinct.
- It is a simple logic truth that, short of mass emigration into space, with rockets taking off at the rate of several million per second,…
- I was brought up in a family which valued natural history. Both my parents knew the names of all the British wildflowers, so as we…
- For me, the level at which natural selection causes the phenomenon of adaptation is the level of the replicator - the gene.
- My eyes are constantly wide open to the extraordinary fact of existence. Not just human existence, but the existence of life and how this breathtakingly…
- If there are other worlds elsewhere in the universe, I would conjecture they are governed by the same laws of natural selection.
- Islands are natural workshops of evolution.
- As Darwin himself was at pains to point out, natural selection is all about differential survival within species, not between them.
- Natural selection will not remove ignorance from future generations.
More Natural Quotes
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- People must feel that the natural world is important and valuable and beautiful and wonderful and an amazement and a pleasure. — David Attenborough
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