Quotes from Richard Dawkins

If you agree that, in the absence of God, you would 'commit robbery, rape, and murder', you reveal yourself as an immoral person, 'and we would be well advised to steer a wide course around you'. If, on the other hand, you admit that you would continue to be a good person even when not under divine surveillance, you have fatally undermined your claim that God is necessary for us to be good.

When challenged by a zealous Popperian to say how evolution could ever be falsified, J. B. S. Haldane famously growled: 'Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian.

The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas-covered planet going around a nuclear fireball ninety million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.

One gene may be regarded as a unit that survives through a large number of successive individual bodies.

Rather than propose a new theory or unearth a new fact, often the most important contribution a scientist can make is to discover a new way of seeing old theories or facts.

To be fair, 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.

If you don't know anything about computers, just remember that they are machines that do exactly what you tell them but often surprise you in the result.

There is no universally agreed definition of a gene.

Go out into a big field with a football and plonk it down to represent the sun. Then walk 25 metres away and drop a peppercorn to represent the Earth's size and its distance from the sun. The moon, to the same scale, would be a pinhead, and it would be only 5 centimetres away from the peppercorn. But the nearest other star, Proxima Centauri, to the same scale, would be another (slightly smaller) football located about … wait for it … six and a half thousand kilometres away!

The workings of the sensory systems are particularly baffling, because they can achieve far more sophisticated feats of pattern-recognition than the best and most expensive man-made machines; if this were not so, all typists would be redundant, superseded by speech-recognizing machines, or machines for reading handwriting.

that childlike inability to distinguish what is true from what we'd like to be true.

If there are versions of the evolution theory that deny slow gradualism, and deny the central role of natural selection, they may be true in particular cases. But they cannot be the whole truth, for they deny the very heart of the evolution theory, which gives it the power to dissolve astronomical improbabilities and explain prodigies of apparent miracle.

The genetic code is universal. I regard this as near-conclusive proof that all organisms are descended from a single common ancestor.

others to disagree with you. Form independent opinions on the basis of your own reason and experience; do not allow yourself to be led blindly by others. Question everything.

how unordered atoms could group themselves into ever more complex patterns until they ended up manufacturing people.

It is the plain truth that we are cousins of chimpanzees, somewhat more distant cousins of monkeys, more distant cousins still of aardvarks and manatees, yet more distant cousins of bananas and turnips

The earliest form of natural selection was simply a selection of stable forms and a rejection of unstable ones. There is no mystery about this. It had to happen by definition.

Joseph Smith, its enterprisingly mendacious inventor, went to the lengths of composing a complete new holy book, the Book of Mormon, inventing from scratch a whole new bogus American history, written in bogus seventeenth-century English.

The evolution of complex life, indeed its very existence in a universe obeying physical laws, is wonderfully surprising - or would be but for the fact that surprise is an emotion that can exist only in a brain which is the product of that very surprising process

Admittedly Turing was not buried alive under a wall pushed over by a tank. He was offered a choice between two years in prison (you can imagine how the other prisoners would have treated him) and a course of hormone injections which could be said to amount to chemical castration, and would have caused him to grow breasts. His final, private choice was an apple that he had injected with cyanide.

our species is the only one not allowed to go to the vet to be painlessly put out of our misery.

the closing words of my first book, 'We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.

An itinerant selfish gene Said 'Bodies a plenty I've seen. You think you're so clever But I'll live for ever. You're just a survival machine.

There is no inconsistency in favouring Darwinism as an academic scientist while opposing it as a human being;