Quotes from Richard Dawkins

We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.* 12

most of us happily disavow fairies, astrology and the Flying Spaghetti Monster, without first immersing ourselves in books of Pastafarian theology etc.

Pat Robertson would be harmless comedy, were he less typical of those who today hold power and influence in the United States.

What if God is a scientist who regards honest seeking after truth as the supreme virtue?

The habit of questioning authority is one of the most valuable gifts that a book, or a teacher, can give a young would-be scientist.

Maybe scientists are fundamentalist when it comes to defining in some abstract way what is meant by 'truth'. But so is everybody else. I am no more fundamentalist when I say evolution is true than when I say it is true that New Zealand is in the southern hemisphere. We believe in evolution because the evidence supports it, and we would abandon it overnight if new evidence arose to disprove it.

Putting these three things together we arrive at our own 'central theorem' of the extended phenotype: An animal's behaviour tends to maximize the survival of the genes 'for' that behaviour, whether or not those genes happen to be in the body of the particular animal performing it.

we have all been guilty of bending over backwards to be nice to an unworthy but powerful opponent

if a design is good enough to evolve once, the same design principle is good enough to evolve twice, from different starting points, in different parts of the animal kingdom.

look carefully at any region of the world where you find intractable enmity and violence between rival groups today. I cannot guarantee that you'll find religions as the dominant labels for in-groups and out-groups. But it's a good bet.

Do those people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration to moral rectitude have the slightest notion of what is actually written in it? The following offences merit the death penalty, according to Leviticus 20: cursing your parents; committing adultery; making love to your stepmother or your daughter-in-law; homosexuality; marrying a woman and her daughter; bestiality (and, to add injury to insult, the unfortunate beast is to be killed too).

Remember, all I am trying to establish for the moment is that we do not, as a matter of fact, derive our morals from scripture. Or, if we do, we pick and choose among the scriptures for the nice bits and reject the nasty. But then we must have some independent criterion for deciding which are the moral bits: a criterion which, wherever it comes from, cannot come from scripture itself and is presumably available to all of us whether we are religious or not.

Should we then not expect lions to refrain from killing antelopes, 'for the good of the mammals'?

Human suffering has been caused because too many of us cannot grasp that words are only tools for our use, and that the mere presence in the dictionary of a word like 'living' does not mean it necessarily has to refer to something definite in the real world

If you don't understand how something works, never mind: just give up and say God did it.

Sözcükler bizim hizmetkârlar?m?zd?r, efendilerimiz deÄŸil.

THE evidence for evolution grows by the day, and has never been stronger. At the same time, paradoxically, ill-informed opposition is also stronger than I can remember. This book is my personal summary of the evidence that the 'theory' of evolution is actually a fact – as incontrovertible a fact as any in science.

Those who wish to base their morality literally on the Bible have either not read it or not understood it, as Bishop John Shelby Spong, in The Sins of Scripture, rightly observed.

There is more than just grandeur in this view of life, bleak and cold though it can seem from under the security blanket of ignorance. There is deep refreshment to be had from standing up and facing straight into the strong keen wind of understanding: Yeats's 'Winds that blow through the starry ways'.

No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish.

In the world of the extended phenotype, ask not how an animal's behaviour benefits its genes; ask instead whose genes it is benefiting.

The American comedian Cathy Ladman observes that 'All religions are the same: religion is basically guilt, with different holidays.

The efforts of apologists to find genuinely distinguished modern scientists who are religious have an air of desperation, generating the unmistakably hollow sound or bottoms of barrels being scraped.

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.