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
lucky sun chance
The chances of each of us coming into existence are infinitesimally small, and even though we shall all die some day, we should count ourselves fantastically lucky to get our decades in the sun.
dangerous
Yesterday's dangerous idea is today's orthodoxy and tomorrow's cliché.
feelings understanding atheism
My personal feeling is that understanding evolution led me to atheism.
health theory-of-evolution inspire
Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun.
together-we-can religion together
Religion: Together we can find the cure.
atheist this-life
Being an atheist frees you up to live this life properly, happily, and fully.
atheist religion atheism
Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.
moon religion atheism
Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings.
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.
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.
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.