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
Richard Dawkins quotes about
powerful people weapons
Religion is a powerful weapon that can be used because it persuades people to do things. And thus it can be used for good or ill. But it should not be a powerful weapon at all.
gadgets computer designer
My computer is a very complex gadget and it was designed by many designers, so why must the universe have only a single designer and not many designers?
viruses ifs
If we say that religion is a virus, then why isn't science a virus?
stress thinking giving
It's known that stress gives rise to disease. It's also known that many diseases, especially stress-related diseases, can be cured by placebos - pills that have no medicinal effect, but people think they do, and so they do.
science law problem
The physicist's problem is the problem of ultimate origins and ultimate natural laws. The biologist's problem is the problem of complexity.
cloning answers world
Anybody who objects to cloning on principle has to answer to all the identical twins in the world who might be insulted by the thought that there is something offensive about their very existence. Clones are simply identical twins.
religious knowledge people
Religious people split into three main groups when faced with science. I shall label them the "know-nothings", the "know-alls", and the "no-contests."
science camels world
Cheetah genes cooperate with cheetah genes but not with camel genes, and vice versa. This is not because cheetah genes, even in the most poetic sense, see any virtue in the preservation of the cheetah species. They are not working to save the cheetah from extinction like some molecular World Wildlife Fund.
sahara lucky evolution
We're going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.
mean common-sense answers
I mean it as a compliment when I say that you could almost define a philosopher as someone who won't take common sense for an answer.
world details culture
Though the details differ across the world, no known culture lacks some version of the time-consuming, wealth consuming, hostility provoking rituals, the anti-factual, counter-productive fantasies of religion.
adults evolution program
Evolution is not a genetically controlled distortion of one adult form into another; it is a genetically controlled alteration in a developmental program.
teaching theory-of-evolution immorality
Even if it were true that evolution, or the teaching of evolution, encouraged immorality that would not imply that the theory of evolution was false.
giving intuition needs
And the beauty of the anthropic principle is that it tells us, against all intuition, that a chemical model need only predict that life will arise on one planet in a billion billion to give us a good and entirely satisfying explanation for the presence of life here.