Quotes from Richard Dawkins

if Jesus really was born of a virgin, Joseph's ancestry is irrelevant and cannot be used to fulfil, on Jesus' behalf, the Old Testament prophecy that the Messiah should be descended from David.

The genotype may be a 'physiological team', but we do not have to believe that that team was necessarily selected as a harmonious unit in comparison with less harmonious rival units. Rather, each gene was selected because it prospered in its environment, and its environment necessarily included the other genes which were simultaneously prospering in the gene-pool. Genes with complementary 'skills' prosper in each others' presence.

That you cannot prove God's non-existence is accepted and trivial, if only in the sense that we can never absolutely prove the non-existence of anything. What matters is not whether God is disprovable (he isn't) but whether his existence is probable. That is another matter.

Only religious faith is a strong enough force to motivate such utter madness in otherwise sane and decent people.

And if we have independent criteria for choosing among religious moralities, why not cut out the middle man and go straight for the moral choice without the religion?

The earliest form of natural selection was simply a selection of stable forms and a rejection of unstable ones.

Fundamentalists know they are right because they have read the truth in a holy book and they know, in advance, that nothing will budge them from their belief. The truth of the holy book is an axiom, not the end product of a process of reasoning. The book is true, and if the evidence seems to contradict it, it is the evidence that must be thrown out, not the book.

Our consciousness is also raised by the cruelty and wastefulness of natural selection. Predators seem beautifully 'designed' to catch prey animals, while the prey animals seem equally beautifully 'designed' to escape them. Whose side is God on?

What does complementariness mean for genes? Two genes may be said to be complementary if the survival of each, relative to its alleles, is enhanced when the other is abundant in the population.

We don't have to invent wildly implausible stories: we have the joy and excitement of real scientific investigation and discovery to keep our imaginations in line. And in the end that is more exciting than fantasy.

To the extent that active germ-line replicators benefit from the survival of the group of individuals in which they sit, over and above the two effects just mentioned, we may expect to see adaptations for the preservation of the group.

An animal moves as a coordinated whole, as a unit. Subjectively I feel like a unit, not a colony. This is to be expected. Selection has favoured genes that cooperate with others. In the fierce competition for scarce resources, in the relentless struggle to eat other survival machines, and to avoid being eaten, there must have been a premium on central coordination rather than anarchy within the communal body.

Natural selection builds child brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and tribal elders tell them. Such trusting obedience is valuable for survival: the analogue of steering by the moon for a moth. But the flip side of trusting obedience is slavish gullibility. The inevitable by-product is vulnerability to infection by mind viruses.

Just as feminists wince when they hear 'he' rather than 'he or she', or 'man' rather than 'human', I want everybody to flinch whenever we hear a phrase such as 'Catholic child' or 'Muslim child'.

To an evolutionary psychologist, the universal extravagance of religious rituals, with their costs in time, resources, pain and privation, should suggest as vividly as a mandrills bottom that religion may be adaptive. —MAREK KOHN

H. L. Mencken was prophetic when he wrote: 'Deep within the heart of every evangelist lies the wreck of a car salesman.

Unless otherwise stated, 'altruistic behaviour' and 'selfish behaviour' will mean behaviour directed by one animal body toward another.

To adapt Alice's comment on her sister's book before she fell into Wonderland, what is the use of a God who does no miracles and answers no prayers? Remember Ambrose Bierce's witty definition of the verb 'to pray': 'to ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy'.

It is fundamental to the idea of a replicator that when a mistake or 'mutation' does occur it is passed on to future copies: the mutation brings into existence a new kind of replicator which 'breeds true' until there is a further mutation

Uno de los verdaderamente nefastos efectos de la religión es que nos inculca como virtud el estar satisfechos con el desconocimiento.

atheists and agnostics are not organized and therefore exert almost zero influence. Indeed, organizing atheists has been compared to herding cats, because they tend to think independently and will not conform to authority.

Genes manipulate the world and shape it to assist their replication.

Obviously, the vast majority of evolutionary change is invisible to direct eye-witness observation. Most of it happened before we were born, and in any case, it is usually too slow to be seen during an individual's lifetime.

The trouble with overt trial is that it takes time and energy. The trouble with overt error is that it is often fatal. Simulation is both safer and faster.