Richard Dawkins Quotes - Page 2

The truth is more magical - in the best and most exciting sense of the word - than any myth or made-up mystery or miracle. Science has its own magic: the magic of reality.

A god who is capable of sending intelligible signals to millions of people simultaneously, and of receiving messages from all of them simultaneously, cannot be, whatever else he might be, simple. Such Bandwidth!

DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.

If the history-deniers who doubt the fact of evolution are ignorant of biology, those who think the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worse than ignorant, they are deluded to the point of perversity. They are denying not only the facts of biology but those of physics, geology, cosmology, archaeology, history and chemistry as well.

Even if not a single fossil has ever been found, the evidence from surviving animals would still overwhelmingly force the conclusion that Darwin was right.

Presumably there is indeed no purpose in the ultimate fate of the cosmos, but do any of us really tie our life's hopes to the ultimate fate of the cosmos anyway? Of course we don't; not if we are sane. Our lives are ruled by all sorts of closer, warmer, human ambitions and perceptions.

We think we know that chimpanzees are higher animals and earthworms are lower, we think we've always known what that means, and we think evolution makes it even clearer. But it doesn't. It is by no means clear that it means anything at all. Or if it means anything, it means so many different things to be misleading, even pernicious.

Despite the Great Chain of Being's traditional ranking of humans between animals and angels, there is no evolutionary justification for the common assumption that evolution is somehow 'aimed' at humans, or that humans are 'evolution's last word'.

It is interesting to wonder whether taxonomists of the future may regret the way our generation messed around with genomes.

I know that not all my readers like my digressions, but the research that has been done on Caenorhabditis elegans is such a ringing triumph of science that you aren't going to stop me.

O darwinismo é uma teoria de processos cumulativos tão lentos que se desenrolam ao longo de milhares e milhões de anos. Todos os nossos juízos intuitivos sobre o que é provável mostram-se errados por larga margem.

I am passionate about the truth. Passion is very different from fundamentalism.

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

Religion is a distraction from true education.

Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.

The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.

Why, I can't help wondering, is God thought to need such ferocious
defence? One might have supposed him amply capable of looking
after himself.

I believe that an orderly universe, one indifferent to human preoccupations, in which everything has an expla nation even if we still have a long way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more wonderful place than a universe tricked out with capricious, ad hoc magic.

The idea of a divine creator belittles the elegant reality of the universe.

It does not seem ever to have been satisfactorily answered why the two first operational atomic bombs were used - against the strongly voiced wishes of the leading physicists responsible for developing them - to destroy two cities instead of being deployed in the equivalent of spectacularly shooting out candles.