Evolutionary biology Quote by Richard Dawkins

“I speculate that we shall come to accept the more radical idea that each one of our genes is a symbiotic unit. We are gigantic colonies of symbiotic genes.” quote by Richard Dawkins — Download Open image

““I speculate that we shall come to accept the more radical idea that each one of our genes is a symbiotic unit. We are gigantic colonies of symbiotic genes.””

Richard Dawkins

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Evolutionary biology Symbiosis

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At the deepest level, all living things that have ever been looked at have the same DNA code. And many of the same genes.

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The word 'mundane' has come to mean 'boring' and 'dull', and it really shouldn't - it should mean the opposite. Because it comes from…

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We animals are the most complicated things in the known universe.

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“The fundamentalist Kurt Wise proclaims that all the evidence in the universe would not change his mind. The true scientist, however passionately he may…

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“I have found it an amusing strategy, when asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that the questioner is also an atheist…

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Religions do make claims about the universe--the same kinds of claims that scientists make, except they're usually false.

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“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, composed, revised, translated, distorted and ‘improved’ by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries.90 This may explain some of the sheer strangeness of the…

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The recurrent laryngeal nerve - which runs from the head to the voice box - goes all the way down into the chest, loops around a major artery, then goes all the way back up again. It goes right past the larynx on the way down. All a decent designer would have to do is loop it off at that…

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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,…

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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

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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…

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Or why it is acceptable to train fast runners and high jumpers but not to breed them. I can think of some answers, and…

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More Evolutionary biology quotes

“Love begins with the stage of subconscious primitive lust and attraction. I’m saying primitive because at this very early stage there is really no…

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"Methodological naturalism" and "metaphysical naturalism" are terms that often surface in the continuing battle between evolutionary biology and creationism/intelligent design. The methodological thesis says that scientific theories shouldn't postulate supernatural entities; the metaphysical thesis says that no such entities exist. In this debate, God is the supernatural entity at issue; the question isn't whether science gets to talk about mathematical…

Elliott Sober

Today the human race is a single twig on the tree of life, a single species on a single planet. Our condition can thus only be described as extremely fragile, endangered by forces of nature currently beyond our control, our own mistakes, and other branches of the wildly blossoming tree itself. Looked at this way, we can then pose the…

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The big picture, I think, is that common ancestry is evidentially prior to natural selection in Darwin's theory and in contemporary evolutionary biology as…

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This is not to deny that there are versions of theism that do conflict with evolutionary biology. Young Earth Creationism is an example; it…

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I don't believe, for instance, that evolutionary biology or any scientific endeavor has much to say about love. I'm sure a lot can be learned about the importance of hormones and their effects on our feelings. But do the bleak implications of evolution have any impact on the love I feel for my family? Do they make me more likely…

Greg Graffin

“If Charles Darwin reappeared today, he might be surprised to learn that humans are descended from viruses as well as from apes.”

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Paleontologist Niles Eldredge, a prominent evolutionist, said: 'The doubt that has infiltrated the previous, smugly confident certitude of evolutionary biology’s last twenty years has inflamed passions.' He spoke of the 'lack of total agreement even within the warring camps,' and added, 'things really are in an uproar these days . . . Sometimes it seems as though there are as…

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Evolutionary biology is genuinely scientific, but more than that it opens the door to a world more marvellous than any Christian fundamentalist has ever…

Ambrose Bierce

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There are a whole other range of sciences that must deal with the narrative reconstruction of the inordinately complex events of history that can occur but once in their detailed glory. And for those kinds of sciences, be it cosmology, or evolutionary biology, or geology, or palaeontology, the experimental methods, simplification, quantification, prediction and repetition of the experimental sciences don't…

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“Males of all species are made for wooing females, and females typically choose among their suitors. If you take a closer look, you can observe such behavior all around you. The beautiful bird chirping outside your window. It’s a mating call. That pretty little bird is trying to attract a potential mate, so that it can propagate its genes. Why…

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