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.
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.
moon religion atheism
Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings.
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.
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.
years long generations
Molecular evidense suggests that our common ancestor with the chimpanzees lived, in Africa, between 5 and 7 million years ago, say half a million generations ago. This is not long by evolutionary standards.
kings prayer dust
My last vestige of 'hands off religion' respect disappeared in the smoke and choking dust of September 11th 2001, followed by the 'National Day of Prayer,' when prelates and pastors did their tremulous Martin Luther King impersonations and urged people of mutually incompatible faiths to hold hands, united in homage to the very force that caused the problem in the first place.