Quotes from Richard Dawkins

To recapitulate, the significance of the difference between growth and reproduction is that reproduction permits a new beginning, a new developmental cycle, and a new organism which may be an improvement, in terms of the fundamental organization of complex structure, over its predecessor.

To cite the old clichés, science gets the age of rocks, and religion the rock of ages; science studies how the heavens go, religion how to go to heaven.

The whole purpose of our search for a 'unit of selection' is to discover a suitable actor to play the leading role in our metaphors of purpose.

Most of the DNA molecules in our bodies are dead-end replicators. They may be the ancestors of a few dozen generations of mitotic replication, but they will definitely not be long-term ancestors.

When we talk of a program as 'doing better' or as being 'successful' we are notionally measuring success as capacity to propagate copies of the same program in the next generation: in reality this is likely to mean that a successful program is one which promotes the survival and reproduction of the animal adopting it.

Although a good God regrets our suffering, his greatest concern is surely that each of us shall show patience, sympathy and generosity and, thereby, form a holy character. Some people badly need to be ill for their own sake, and some people badly need to be ill to provide important choices for others.

Adoption and contraception, like reading, mathematics, and stress-induced illness, are products of an animal that is living in an environment radically different from the one in which its genes were naturally selected.

He has no theistic beliefs, but shares the poetic naturalism that the cosmos provokes in

As long as we accept the principle that religious faith must be respected simply because it is religious faith, it is hard to withhold respect from the faith of Osama bin Laden and the suicide bombers.

What is the colour of abstraction? What is the smell of hope?

Debemos enseñar a nuestros hijos el altruismo ya que no podemos esperar que éste forme parte de su naturaleza biológica

But religious faith is an especially potent silencer of rational calculation, which usually seems to trump all others. This is mostly, I suspect, because of the easy and beguiling promise that death is not the end, and that a martyr's heaven is especially glorious. But it is also partly because it discourages questioning, by its very nature.

The point about recurrent reproduction life cycles, and hence, by implication, the point about organisms, is that they allow repeated returns to the drawing board during evolutionary time.

There is in every village a torch—the teacher: and an extinguisher—the clergyman.

Firstly, we could ban reproduction before a certain age, say forty. After some centuries of this the minimum age limit would be raised to fifty, and so on. It is conceivable that human longevity could be pushed up to several centuries by this means.

The pre-eminent mystery is why anything exists at all.

A DNA molecule in the germ-line of an individual who happens to die young, or who otherwise fails to reproduce, should not be called a dead-end replicator. Such germ-lines are, as it turns out, terminal. They fail in what may metaphorically be called their aspiration to immortality. Differential failure of this kind is what we mean by natural selection.

It is a matter of history that the spread of Islam, from Arabia throughout the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent, was due to military conquest. And the same goes for the spread of Christianity by the Spanish conquerors in South and Central America

But whether it succeeds in practice or not, any germ-line replicator is potentially immortal. It 'aspires' to immortality but in practice is in danger of failing.

Since we're all composed of matter and energy, doesn't that scientific principle lend credibility to a belief in eternal life?' Mills replied more patiently and politely than I would have, for what the interviewer was saying, translated into English, was no more than: 'When we die, none of the atoms of our body (and none of the energy) are lost. Therefore we are immortal.

As I said, the active/passive distinction cuts across the germ-line/dead-end distinction. All four combinations are conceivable.

Moving on from the elite scientists of the National Academy and the Royal Society, is there any evidence that, in the population at large, atheists are likely to be drawn from among the better educated and more intelligent?

The human psyche has two great sicknesses: the urge to carry vendetta across generations, and the tendency to fasten group labels on people rather than see them as individuals.

The integrated multicellular organism is a phenomenon which has emerged as a result of natural selection on primitively independent selfish replicators. It has paid replicators to behave gregariously. The phenotypic power by which they ensure their survival is in principle extended and unbounded. In practice the organism has arisen as a partially bounded local concentration, a shared knot of replicator power.