Quotes from Richard Dawkins

The word replicator is purposely defined in a general way, so that it does not even have to refer to DNA.

Unweaving the Rainbow

Religion, as ever, is the trump card. Imagine members of an art appreciation society pleading in court that they 'believe' they need a hallucinogenic drug in order to enhance their understanding of Impressionist or Surrealist paintings. Yet, when a church claims an equivalent need, it is backed by the highest court in the land. Such is the power of religion as a talisman.

I am, indeed, quite sympathetic towards the idea that human culture provides a new milieu in which an entirely different kind of replicator selection can go on.

THE ARGUMENT FROM ADMIRED RELIGIOUS SCIENTISTS The immense majority of intellectually eminent men disbelieve in Christian religion, but they conceal the fact in public, because they are afraid of losing their incomes.

But the whole point of Hamilton's argument is that the distinction between family and non-family is not hard and fast, but a matter of mathematical probability.

On reflection, my imagined Hindu litigator would have been as likely to play the 'If you can't beat them join them' card. His polytheism isn't really polytheism but monotheism in disguise.

The notion that religion is a proper field, in which one might claim expertise, is one that should not go unquestioned.

Dan Dennett reminds us that the common cold is universal to all human peoples in much the same way as religion is, yet we would not want to suggest that colds benefit us.

on page 96 of my hero Peter Medawar's book The Limits of Science: 'I regret my disbelief in God and religious answers generally, for I believe it would give satisfaction and comfort to many in need of it if it were possible to discover good scientific and philosophic reasons to believe in God.

From the viewpoint of this book an animal artefact, like any other phenotypic product whose variation is influenced by a gene, can be regarded as a phenotypic tool by which that gene could potentially lever itself into the next generation.

I am not sure what to make of my admittedly anecdotal observation that many of those who most ardently oppose the taking of embryonic life also seem to be more than usually enthusiastic about taking adult life.

being a true clone, the aphids are no more 'social' than the cells of your body. There is a single animal feeding on the plant. It just happens to have its body divided up into physically separate aphids, some of which play a specialized defensive role just like white blood corpuscles in the human body.

somebody who thinks natural selection is a theory of chance whereas—in the relevant sense of chance—it is the opposite.

We are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.

In the original fertilized egg, for instance, certain chemicals congregate at one end of the cell, others at the other end. When such a polarized cell divides, the two daughter cells receive different chemical allocations. This means that different genes will be read in the two daughter cells, and a kind of self-reinforcing divergence gets going.

uno de los efectos auténticamente perniciosos de la religión es que enseña que estar satisfecho con el desconocimiento es una virtud.

What is remarkable is the polar opposition between the religiosity of the American public at large and the atheism of the intellectual elite.54

Even without physical abduction, isn't it always a form of child abuse to label children as possessors of beliefs that they are too young to have thought about?

Real science can be hard but, like classical literature or playing the violin, worth the struggle.

We would not waste time saying so because nobody, so far as I know, worships teapots;fn4 but, if pressed, we would not hesitate to declare our strong belief that there is positively no orbiting teapot. Yet strictly we should all be teapot agnostics: we cannot prove, for sure, that there is no celestial teapot. In practice, we move away from teapot agnosticism towards a-teapotism.

If people wish to love a 7th century preacher more than their own families, that's up to them, but nobody else is obliged to take it seriously . . .

There is mystery but never magic, and mysteries are all the more beautiful for being eventually explained. Things are explicable and it is our privilege to explain them.

Half a wing could save your life by easing your fall from a tree of a certain height. And 51 per cent of a wing could save you if you fall from a slightly taller tree.