Quotes from Richard Dawkins

The long-lived gene as an evolutionary unit is not any particular physical structure but the textual archival information that is copied on down the generations. [I]t is widely distributed in space among different individuals, and widely distributed in time over many generations. [A] successful gene will be one that does well in the environments provided by these other genes that it is likely to meet in lots of different bodies.

Human suffering has been caused because too many of us cannot grasp that words are only tools for our use, and that the mere presence in the dictionary of a word like 'living' does not mean it necessarily has to refer to something definite in the real world.

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. Those of us schooled from infancy in his ways can become desensitized to their horror.

If 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

Hijacking by pseudoscience and bad science fiction is a threat to our legitimate sense of wonder.

To regard an organism as a replicator, even an asexual organism like a female stick insect, is tantamount to a violation of the 'central dogma' of the non-inheritance of acquired characteristics.

A professorship of theology should have no place in our institution.

It is in the nature of scientific truths that they are waiting to be discovered, by whoever has the ability to do so. If two different people independently discover something in science, it will be the same truth. Unlike works of art, scientific truths do not change their nature in response to the individual human beings who discover them. This is both a glory, and a limitation, of science.

It is, when you think about it, remarkable that a religion should adopt an instrument of torture and execution as its sacred symbol, often worn around the neck.

All that happens is that individuals who are accustomed to winning become even more likely to win, while individuals who are accustomed to losing become steadily more likely to lose.

Those who control what young people are taught, and what they experience – what they see, hear, think, and believe – will determine the future course for the nation.

A stick insect looks like a replicator, in that we may lay out a sequence consisting of daughter, granddaughter, great-granddaughter, etc., in which each appears to be a replica of the preceding one in the series. But suppose a flaw or blemish appears somewhere in the chain, say a stick insect is unfortunate enough to lose a leg. The blemish may last for the whole of her lifetime, but it is not passed on to the next link in the chain.

Science-fiction authors, such as Daniel F. Galouye in Counterfeit World, have even suggested (and I cannot think how to disprove it) that we live in a computer simulation, set up by some vastly superior civilization.

We see only moths wheeling into our candle, and we ask the wrong question: Why are all these moths committing suicide? Instead, we should ask why they have nervous systems that steer by maintaining a fixed angle to light rays, a tactic that we notice only where it goes wrong. When the question is rephrased, the mystery evaporates. It never was right to call it suicide. It is a misfiring by-product of a normally useful compass.

megachurch televangelists with their mansions and Lear jets, preaching a 'Jesus wants you to be rich' gospel of self-interest

Genes are the primary policy-makers; brains are the executives.

I'll begin by distinguishing two kinds of agnosticism. TAP, or Temporary Agnosticism in Practice, is the legitimate fence-sitting where there really is a definite answer, one way or the other, but we so far lack the evidence to reach it (or don't understand the evidence, or haven't time to read the evidence, etc.).

In other words, when their loyalty to Judaism was removed from the calculation, the majority of the children agreed with the moral judgements that most modern humans would share. Joshua's action was a deed of barbaric genocide. But it all looks different from a religious point of view. And the difference starts early in life. It was religion that made the difference between children condemning genocide and condoning it. In

A colleague points out to me that immigrants, uprooted from the stability and comfort of an extended family in Europe, could well have embraced a church as a kind of kin-substitute on alien soil. It is an interesting idea, worth researching further.

However, we must expect lies and deceit, and selfish exploitation of communication to arise whenever the interests of the genes of different individuals diverge. This will include individuals of the same species.

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

although evolution may seem, in some vague sense, a 'good thing', especially since we are the product of it, nothing actually 'wants' to evolve.

But there is also a deeply inescapable kind of fence-sitting, which I shall call PAP (Permanent Agnosticism in Principle).

I shall define the God Hypothesis more defensibly: there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us. This book will advocate an alternative view: any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything, comes into existence only as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution.