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
together-we-can religion together
Religion: Together we can find the cure.
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.
atheism young ancestor
Not a single one of your ancestors died young. They all copulated at least once.
machines genes humans
Human beings are just gene machines.
eggs way chickens
The chicken is only an egg’s way for making another egg.
atheism nonsense ends
Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.
religion atheism wish
Those who wish to base their morality literally on the Bible have either not read it or not understood it...
biblical editors evil
To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and 'improved' by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries
wages done pestilence
Science ha seradicated smallpox, can immunise against most previously deadly viruses, can kill most previously deadly bacteria. Theology has done nothing but talk of pestilence as the wages of sin.
funny trust laughter
By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
dna machines designer
To invoke the origin of the DNA/protein machine by invoking a supernatural Designer is to explain precisely nothing - for it leaves unexplained the origin of the Designer.
prejudice evidence
Science replaces private prejudice with public, verifiable evidence.
philosophical sides biology
My interest in biology was pretty much always on the philosophical side.
cells half bacteria
For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria.