evolution

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• The attitude that living things are placed here for our benefit still dominates our culture, even where its underpinnings have disappeared. We now need, for purposes of scientific understanding, to find a less human-centered view of the natural world.

  — Richard Dawkins

• No matter how much knowledge and wisdom you acquire during your life, not one jot will be passed on to your children by genetic means. Each new generation starts from scratch.

  — Richard Dawkins

• We are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.

  — Richard Dawkins

• What is the selfish gene? It is not just one single physical bit of DNA. Just as in the primeval soup, it is all replicas of a particular bit of DNA, distributed throughout the world.

  — Richard Dawkins

• There is no spirit-driven life force, no throbbing, heaving, pullulating, protoplasmic, mystic jelly. Life is just bytes and bytes and bytes of digital information.

  — Richard Dawkins

• They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.

  — Richard Dawkins

• The evolution of the capacity to simulate seems to have culminated in subjective consciousness. Why this should have happened is, to me, the most profound mystery facing modern biology.

  — Richard Dawkins