Quotes from Richard Dawkins

Why did it take so long for a Darwin to arrive on the scene? What delayed humanity's tumbling to that luminously simple idea which seems, on the face of it, so much easier to grasp than the mathematical ideas given us by Newton two centuries earlier - or, indeed, by Archimedes two millennia earlier?

A biochemist colleague has kindly provided me with a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, and enough hydroquinone for 50 bombardier beetles, I am now about to mix the two together. According to the above, they will explode in my face. Here goes... Well... I'm still here! I poured the hydrogen peroxide into the hydroquinone, and absolutely nothing happened. It didn't event get warm!

although evolution may seem, in some vague sense, a 'good thing', especially since we are the product of it, nothing actually 'wants' to evolve. Evolution

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.

It is a strange fact, incidentally, that religious apologists love the anthropic principle. For some reason that makes no sense at all, they think it supports their case. Precisely the opposite is true. The anthropic principle, like natural selection, is an alternative to the design hypothesis. It provides a rational, design-free explanation for the fact that we find ourselves in a situation propitious to our existence.

suppose the god who confronts you when you die turns out to be Baal, and suppose Baal is just as jealous as his old rival Yahweh was said to be. Mightn't Pascal have been better off wagering on no god at all rather than on the wrong god?

These facts about today's political climate in the United States, and what they imply, would have horrified Jefferson, Washington, Madison, Adams and all their friends. Whether they were atheists, agnostics, deists or Christians, they would have recoiled in horror from the theocrats of early 21st-century Washington.

Individuals are temporary meeting points on the crisscrossing routes that genes take through history.

we're apt to forget that symmetry is not an obvious quality that every creature must have.

Genes affect proteins, and proteins affect X which affects Y which affects Z which . . . affects the phenotypic character of interest.

the only good reason to believe that something exists is if there is real evidence that it does.

An atheist in this sense of philosophical naturalist is somebody who believes there is nothing beyond the natural, physical world, no supernatural creative intelligence lurking behind the observable universe, no soul that outlasts the body and no miracles—except in the sense of natural phenomena that we don't yet understand. If

anything that suggests that complicated life forms appeared suddenly, in one go (rather than evolving gradually step by step), is just a lazy story – no better than the fictional magic of a fairy godmother's wand. As

Philosophy and the subjects known as 'humanities' are still taught almost as if Darwin had never lived.

Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them;

Gregory S. Paul, in the Journal of Religion and Society (2005), systematically compared seventeen economically developed nations, and reached the devastating conclusion that 'higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies'.

I know I am in danger of being misunderstood by those people, all too numerous, who cannot distinguish a statement of belief in what is the case from an advocacy of what ought to be the case.

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. Those

children should be taught not so much what to think as how to think.

An organism is the physical unit associated with one single life cycle. Replicators that gang up in multicellular organisms achieve a regularly recycling life history, and complex adaptations to aid their preservation, as they progress through evolutionary time.

To suggest that the first cause, the great unknown which is responsible for something existing rather than nothing, is a being capable of designing the universe and of talking to a million people simultaneously, is a total abdication of the responsibility to find an explanation. It is a dreadful exhibition of self-indulgent, thought denying skyhookery.

And of all its money-making rip-offs, the selling of indulgences must surely rank among the greatest con tricks in history, the medieval equivalent of the Nigerian Internet scam but far more successful.

natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being.

My purpose is to examine the biology of selfishness and altruism.