Quotes from Richard Dawkins

Do you really mean to tell me the only reason you try to be good is to gain God's approval and reward, or to avoid his disapproval and punishment? That's not morality, that's just sucking up, apple-polishing, looking over your shoulder at the great surveillance camera in the sky, or in the still small wiretap inside your head, monitoring your every move, even your every base thought.

In principle, we may consider any portion of chromosome as a potential candidate for the title of replicator.

The important point is that it is [the children's] privilege to decide what they shall think, and not their parents' privilege to impose it by force majeure.

Politicians who invent external threats from foreign powers, in order to scare up economic or voter support for themselves, might find that a potentially colliding meteor answers their ignoble purpose just as well as an Evil Empire, an Axis of Evil, or the more nebulous abstraction 'Terror', with the added benefit of encouraging international co-operation rather than divisiveness

Professor Einstein, every Christian in America will immediately reply to you, 'Take your crazy, fallacious theory of evolution and go back to Germany where you came from, or stop trying to break down the faith of a people who gave you a welcome when you were forced to flee your native land.'   The

In that case there must have been genes controlling variation in caddis houses, for selection cannot produce adaptations unless there are hereditary differences among which to select.

Here are some dates at which women were granted the vote:   New Zealand 1893 Australia 1902 Finland 1906 Norway 1913 United States 1920 Britain 1928 France 1945 Belgium 1946 Switzerland 1971 Kuwait 2006

Root of All Evil?

I think we should all wince when we hear a small child being labelled as belonging to some particular religion or another. Small children are too young to decide their views on the origins of the cosmos, of life and of morals. The very sound of the phrase Christian child or Muslim child should grate like fingernails on a blackboard.

Natural selection may usually be safely regarded as the differential survival of replicators relative to their alleles.

The other thing I cannot help remarking upon is the overweening confidence with which the religions assert minute details for which they neither have, nor could have, any evidence. Perhaps it is the very fact that there is no evidence to support theological opinions, either way, that fosters the characteristic draconian hostility towards those of slightly different opinion, especially, as it happens, in the very field of Trinitarianism.

Once the vital ingredient—some kind of genetic molecule—is in place, true Darwinian natural selection can follow, and complex life emerges as the eventual consequence.

We are fundamentally interested in natural selection, therefore in the differential survival of replicating entities such as genes. Genes are favoured or disfavoured relative to their alleles as a consequence of their phenotypic effects upon the world. Some of these phenotypic effects may be incidental consequences of others, and have no bearing on the survival chances, one way or the other, of the genes concerned.

The priests of the different religious sects . . . dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight, and scowl on the fatal harbinger announcing the subdivision of the duperies on which they live. —THOMAS JEFFERSON

For all I know, entire scientific reputations may have been built on the work of students and colleagues! I don't know what can be done to combat this dishonesty.

Fashionably relativist intellectuals chime in to insist that there is no absolute truth: whether Holocaust happened is a matter of personal belief; all points of view are equally valid and should be equally 'respected'.

The word allele is nowadays customarily used of cistrons but it is clearly easy, and in the spirit of this chapter, to generalize it to any portion of chromosome.

David Hume's pithy test for a miracle comes irresistibly to mind: 'No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish.

I don't try to imagine a personal God; it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it. —ALBERT EINSTEIN

H. L. Mencken, again with characteristic cynicism, defined conscience as the inner voice that warns us that someone may be looking.

Many will remember with affection the day Basil Fawlty's car broke down during his vital mission to save Gourmet Night from disaster. He gave it fair warning, counted to three, then got out of the car, seized a tree branch and thrashed it to within an inch of its life.

If your pet is dying in pain, you will be condemned for cruelty if you do not summon the vet to give him a general anaesthetic from which he will not come round. But if your doctor performs exactly the same merciful service for you when you are dying in pain, he runs the risk of being prosecuted for murder.

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'.

Labelling of children. Children are described as 'Catholic children' or 'Protestant children' etc. from an early age, and certainly far too early for them to have made up their own minds on what they think about religion.