Quotes from Richard Dawkins

My passion is for scientific truth. I don't much care about good and evil. … I care about what's true.

Always devise your rules as if you didn't know whether you were going be at the top or the bottom of the pecking order.

Deists differ from theists in that their God does not answer prayers, is not interested in sins or confessions, does not read our thoughts and does not intervene with capricious miracles.

Good' genes are blindly selected as those that survive in the gene pool.

we are more inclined to mistake a shadow for a burglar than a burglar for a shadow. A false positive might be a waste of time. A false negative could be fatal.

These are claims that could have been made for Lorenz's On Aggression, Ardrey's The Social Contract, and Eibl-Eibesfeldt's Love and Hate. The trouble with these books is that their authors got it totally and utterly wrong. They got it wrong because they misunderstood how evolution works. They made the erroneous assumption that the important thing in evolution is the good of the species (or the group) rather than the good of the individual (or the gene).

If human breeders can transform a wolf into a Pekinese, or a wild cabbage into a cauliflower, in just a few centuries or millennia, why shouldn't the non-random survival of wild animals and plants do the same thing over millions of years?

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

We can't prove anything in science. But the best that scientists can do is fail to disprove things while pointing to how hard they tried.

non-existent male? I suppose that, in the ditzily

Strange is our situation here on Earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that man is here for the sake of other men – above all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness depends. ALBERT EINSTEIN

Bir ça??n dini, bir sonrakinin edebi eÄŸlencesidir. Ralph Waldo

Each gene works in a world of phenotypic consequences of other genes. Some of those other genes will be members of the same genome. Others will be members of the same gene-pool operating through other bodies. Yet others may be members of different gene-pools, different species, different phyla.

Paul Davies's The Mind of God seems to hover somewhere between Einsteinian pantheism and an obscure form of deism—for

Functionally speaking, too, genes are gregarious. They have phenotypic effects on bodies, but they do not do so in isolation. I stress this over and over again in this book.

The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant'? Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.

mostly science is, for me, a source of living joy

If you push novelty of language and metaphor far enough, you can end up with a new way of seeing.

Similarly, we can all agree that science's entitlement to advise us on moral values is problematic, to say the least. But does Gould really want to cede to religion the right to tell us what is good and what is bad?

frequently recommend Miller's book, Finding Darwin's God

When we die there are two things we can leave behind us: genes and memes.

When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.

Hitler no doubt killed more people than Genghis, but he had twentieth-century technology at his disposal.

Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus.