Quotes from Richard Dawkins

The genes are master programmers, and they are programming for their lives. They are judged according to the success of their programs in coping with all the hazards that life throws at their survival machines, and the judge is the ruthless judge of the court of survival.

As the Nobel Prize-winning American physicist Steven Weinberg said, 'Religion is an insult to human dignity.

Well, my family has been Catholic for generations, so doesn't that make me Catholic?' 'That's lazy, sloppy abuse of language. My family has been farming for generations but that doesn't define me as a farmer.

Active replicators have some effect on the world, which influences their chances of surviving.

My passion is based on evidence.

Animals therefore go to elaborate lengths to find and catch food; to avoid being caught and eaten themselves; to avoid disease and accident; to protect themselves from unfavourable climatic conditions; to find members of the opposite sex and persuade them to mate; and to confer on their children advantages similar to those they enjoy themselves.

Don't squander precious ignorance by researching it away.

It is the effects on the world of successful active germ-line replicators that we see as adaptations.

To try to make a man, you would have to work at your biochemical cocktail-shaker for a period so long that the entire age of the universe would seem like an eye-blink, and even then you would not succeed.

God is omniscient, he must already know how he is going to intervene to change the course of history using his omnipotence. But that means he can't change his mind about his intervention, which means he is not omnipotent.

El Dios del Viejo Testamento; se puede argumentar, es el carácter más desagradable en toda ficción: celoso y orgulloso de serlo; cerrado de mente, injusto, severo y obsesionado con el control; vengativo, un limpiador étnico sediento de sangre, un misógino, homofóbo, racista, infanticida, genocida, filicida, productor de pestilencias, megalomaníaco, sadomasoquista, caprichoso, y un matón malevolente.

We have names for people who have many beliefs for which there is no rational justification. When their beliefs are extremely common we call them religious; otherwise, they are likely to be called mad, psychotic or delusional... Clearly there is sanity in numbers.

I am a deeply religious nonbeliever. This is a somewhat new kind of religion.

More recently, the physicist Russell Stannard (one of Britain's three well-known religious scientists, as we shall see) has thrown his weight behind an initiative, funded by—of course—the Templeton Foundation, to test experimentally the proposition that praying for sick patients improves their health.36

what I want to say is that it doesn't matter what particular style of nonsense infects the child brain. Once infected, the child will grow up and infect the next generation with the same nonsense, whatever it happens to be.

Michael Shermer, in How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science, describes a large survey of randomly chosen Americans that he and his colleague Frank Sulloway carried out. Among their many interesting results was the discovery that religiosity is indeed negatively correlated with education (more highly educated people are less likely to be religious). Religiosity is also negatively correlated with interest in science and (strongly) with political liberalism

But how can there be a perversion of faith, if faith, lacking objective justification, doesn't have any demonstrable standard to pervert.

Leaders who forbid their followers to use effective contraceptive methods express a preference for 'natural' methods of population limitation, and a natural method is exactly what they are going to get. It is called starvation.

Incidentally, I'm puzzled why, with so much oxygen about, thing didn't burst into flames all the time. Perhaps they did.

Those people who leap from personal bafflement at a natural phenomenon straight to a hasty invocation of the supernatural are no better than the fools who see a conjuror bending a spoon and leap to the conclusion that it is 'paranormal'.

The rabbit runs faster than the fox, because the rabbit is running for his life while the fox is only running for his dinner.' My colleague John Krebs and I have dubbed this the 'life/dinner principle'.

Species are grouped together into genera, genera into orders, and orders into classes. Lions and antelopes are both members of the class Mammalia, as are we. Should we then not expect lions to refrain from killing antelopes, 'for the good of the mammals'? Surely they should hunt birds or reptiles instead, in order to prevent the extinction of the class. But then, what of the need to perpetuate the whole phylum of vertebrates?

Natural selection favours those genes that manipulate the world to ensure their own propagation. This leads to what I have called the central theorem of the extended phenotype: An animal's behaviour tends to maximize the survival of the genes 'for' that behaviour, whether or not those genes happen to be in the body of the particular animal performing it.

consciousness-raising.