Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins
Clinton Richard Dawkins FRS FRSLis an English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was the University of Oxford's Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008...
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth26 March 1941
CityNairobi, Kenya
moon religion atheism
Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings.
children mind vulnerable
Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.
atheist belief results
Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not.
selfish science survival
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.
orangutans apes evolution
We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realize that we are apes.
rip successful catholic
The Roman Catholic Church is an institution for whose gains the phrase "ill-gotten" might have been specially invented. And of all its money-making rip-offs, the selling of indulgences must surely rank among the greatest con tricks in history, the medieval equivalent of the Nigerian Internet scam but far more successful.
strong believe reading
If you are offended by reading views that disagree with yours, then yes, you will be offended. However, it is not gratuitously offensive, it simply puts an argument, and if your views are strong enough, as I believe they are, you will be able to defend your views. You will not say, "Oh, it's offensive, it's offensive." You will say "No, you are wrong here and you are wrong here," and that's what you should do.
simple people feelings
I suspect the reason is that most people [...] have a residue of feeling that Darwinian evolution isn't quite big enough to explain everything about life. All I can say as a biologist is that the feeling disappears progressively the more you read about and study what is known about life and evolution. I want to add one thing more. The more you understand the significance of evolution, the more you are pushed away from the agnostic position and towards atheism. Complex, statistically improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable things.
life dna self
We are machines built by DNA whose purpose is to make more copies of the same DNA. ... This is exactly what we are for. We are machines for propagating DNA, and the propagation of DNA is a self-sustaining process. It is every living object's sole reason for living.
life children self
What are all of us but self-reproducing robots? We have been put together by our genes and what we do is roam the world looking for a way to sustain ourselves and ultimately produce another robot child.
survival body machines
The body is a survival machine programmed to propagate the genes that reside inside it.
atheism young ancestor
Not a single one of your ancestors died young. They all copulated at least once.
health theory-of-evolution inspire
The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.
bird mammals consciousness
It's very likely that most mammals have consciousness, and probably birds, too.