Richard Dawkins

1941– · English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author (born 1941)

Topics: evolution, learning, science, programming

• If these creatures are not conscious, then what the hell is consciousness for?

  — Richard Dawkins

• Each generation is a filter, a sieve; good genes tend to fall through the sieve into the next generation; bad genes tend to end up in bodies that die young or without reproducing.

  — Richard Dawkins

• The plaint that there hasn’t been enough time for the eye to evolve turns out to be not just wrong but dramatically, decisively, ignominiously wrong.

  — Richard Dawkins

• Mutation may be random, but selection definitely is not.

  — Richard Dawkins

• Natural selection is all about the differential success of rival DNA in getting itself transmitted vertically in the species archives.

  — Richard Dawkins

• Thus the creationist's favourite question "What is the use of half an eye?" Actually, this is a lightweight question, a doddle to answer. Half an eye is just 1 per cent better than 49 per cent of an eye.

  — Richard Dawkins

• We should be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brain falls out.

  — Richard Dawkins

• Reason has built the modern world. It is a precious but also a fragile thing, which can be corroded by apparently harmless irrationality. We must favor verifiable evidence over private feeling. Otherwise we leave ourselves vulnerable to those who would obscure the truth.

  — Richard Dawkins

• In one way or another, all my books have been devoted to expounding and exploring the almost limitless power of the Darwinian principle—power unleashed whenever and wherever there is enough time for the consequences of primordial self-replication to unfold.

  — Richard Dawkins

• You contain a trillion copies of a large, textual document written in a highly accurate, digital code, each copy as voluminous as a substantial book. I'm talking, of course, of the DNA in your cells.

  — Richard Dawkins

• The human mind is a wanton storyteller and even more, a profligate seeker after pattern. We see faces in clouds and tortillas, fortunes in tea leaves and planetary movements. It is quite difficult to prove a real pattern as distinct from a superficial illusion.

  — Richard Dawkins

• In fact writing a computer program is a pretty good way to summarize knowledge about any set of rules.

  — Richard Dawkins

• Mitochondrial DNA is blessedly celibate. (p.53)

  — Richard Dawkins

• Evolution normally does not come to a halt, but constantly ‘tracks’ the changing environment.

  — Richard Dawkins

• There's real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of reality.

  — Richard Dawkins

• It may be that brain hardware has co-evolved with the internal virtual worlds that it creates. This can be called hardware-software co-evolution.

  — Richard Dawkins

• Darwin, however, saw his doubts as a challenge to go on thinking, not a welcome excuse to give up.

  — Richard Dawkins

• The river of my title is a river of DNA, and it flows through time, not space. It is a river of information, not a river of bones and tissues.

  — Richard Dawkins

• On one point, though, I insist. This is that wherever in nature there is a sufficiently powerful illusion of good design for some purpose, natural selection is the only known mechanism that can account for it.

  — Richard Dawkins

• Contrary to earlier prejudices, there is nothing inherently progressive about evolution.

  — Richard Dawkins