Quotes from Richard Dawkins

This, then, is our candidate replicator. But a candidate should be regarded as an actual replicator only if it possesses some minimum degree of longevity/fecundity/fidelity (there may be trade-offs among the three).

you could almost define a philosopher as someone who won't take common sense for an answer.

Per quanto noi possiamo deplorare una cosa, questo non le impedisce di essere vera.

The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next. RALPH WALDO EMERSON

An arbitrarily defined length of chromosome, or potential replicator, may be said to have an expected half-life, measured in generations.

Phenotypic effects of genes, whether at the level of intracellular biochemistry, gross bodily morphology, or extended phenotype, are potentially devices by which genes lever themselves into the next generation, or barriers to their doing so. Incidental side-effects are not always effective as tools or barriers, and we do not bother to regard them as phenotypic expressions of genes, either at the conventional or the extended phenotype level.

Segregated schools. Children are educated, again often from a very early age, with members of a religious in-group and seperately from children whose families adhere to other religions.

Two kinds of factor will affect this half-life. Firstly, replicators whose phenotypic effects render them successful at their business of propagating themselves will tend to have a long half-life. Replicators with longer half-lives than their alleles will come to predominate in the population, and this is the familiar process of natural selection.

As Germaine Greer wrote, what these people really love and do best is pandemonium.

If the odds of life originating spontaneously on a planet were a billion to one against, nevertheless that stupefyingly improbable event would still happen on a billion planets.

More sophisticated theologians proclaim the sexlessness of God, while some feminist theologians seek to redress historic injustices by designating her female. But what, after all, is the difference between a non-existent female and a non-existent male? I suppose that, in the ditzily unreal intersection of theology and feminism, existence might indeed be a less salient attribute than gender.

He noted that every Sunday, in churches throughout Britain, entire congregations prayed publicly for the health of the royal family. Shouldn't they, therefore, be unusually fit, compared with the rest of us, who are prayed for only by our nearest and dearest?* Galton looked into it, and found no statistical difference. His intention may, in any case, have been satirical, as also when he prayed over randomized plots of land to see if the plants would grow any faster (they didn't).

What we see of the real world is not the unvarnished real world but a model of the real world, regulated and adjusted by sense data - a model that is constructed so that it is useful for dealing with the real world.

A widespread assumption, which nearly everybody in our society accepts – the non-religious included – is that religious faith is especially vulnerable to offence and should be protected by an abnormally thick wall of respect, in a different class from the respect that any human being should pay to any other.

But if we set selection pressures on one side, we can say something about the half-life of a replicator on the basis of its length alone. If the stretch of chromosome we choose to define as our replicator of interest is long, it will tend to have a shorter half-life than a shorter replicator, simply because it is more likely to be broken by crossing-over. A very long portion of chromosome ceases to deserve the title of replicator at all.

Words are our servants, not our masters. For different purposes we find it convenient to use words in different senses.

to ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy'.

Physics appears to be a complicated subject, because the ideas of physics are difficult for us to understand. Our brains were designed to understand hunting and gathering, mating and child-rearing: a world of medium-sized objects moving in three dimensions at moderate speeds.

Scientists who use such language, whether at the level of the individual or the gene, know very well that it is only a figure of speech. Genes are just DNA molecules. You'd have to be barking mad to think that 'selfish' genes really have deliberate intentions to survive!

It is precisely because our own human senses are not capable of doing what bats do that we find it hard to believe. Because we can only understand it at a level of artificial instrumentation, and mathematical calculations on paper, we find it hard to imagine a little animal doing it in its head.

Polls suggest that approximately 95 per cent of the population of the United States believe they will survive their own death.

To succumb to the God Temptation in either of those guises, biological or cosmological, is an act of intellectual capitulation. If you are trying to explain something improbable, it can never suffice to invoke an entity that is, in itself, at least as improbable. If you'll stoop to magicking into existence an unexplained peacock-designer, you might as well magic an unexplained peacock and cut out the middleman.

Time is the currency of this two-bidder auction.

Yet the mathematical calculations that would be necessary to explain the principles of vision are just as complex and difficult, and nobody has ever had any difficulty in believing