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
reality miracle magic
The truth is more magical - in the best and most exciting sense of the word - than any myth or made-up mystery or miracle. Science has its own magic: the magic of reality.
school america enlightenment
The enlightenment is under threat. So is reason. So is truth. So is science, especially in the schools of America.
needs might helping
Why, I can't help wondering, is God thought to need such ferocious defence? One might have supposed him amply capable of looking after himself.
gay bottles different
Suppose that there's a gene that makes you gay if you were bottle-fed but that has some completely different effect if you were breast-fed. So in the days before bottles were invented that gene would not have manifested itself as gay behavior, but now that bottles are common it can do so.
love hope wisdom
Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts which simply do not make evolutionary sense.
order numbers understanding
It is quite true that many scientists, many physicists, maintain that the physical constants, the half dozen or so numbers that physicists have to simply assume in order to derive the rest of their understanding ... have to be assumed. You can't provide a rationale for why those numbers are there. Physicists have calculated that if any of these numbers was a little bit different, the universe as we know it wouldn't exist.
dirty self kind
Reductionism is a dirty word, and a kind of 'holistier than thou' self-righteousness has become fashionable.
purpose purpose-of-life
We have to find our own purposes in life, which are not derived directly from our scientific history.
hate people ugly
People really, really hate their religion being criticized. It's as though you've said they had an ugly face; they seem to identify personally with it.
creativity space procedures
Effective searching procedures become, when the search-space is sufficiently large, indistinguishable from true creativity.
eye feelings way
If you look up at the Milky Way through the eyes of Carl Sagan, you get a feeling in your chest of something greater than yourself. And it is. But it's not supernatural.
eye feelings way
If you look up at the Milky Way through the eyes of Carl Sagan, you get a feeling in your chest of something greater than yourself. And it is. But it's not supernatural.
beautiful strong feelings
I have a strong feeling that the subject of evolution is beautiful without the excuse of creationists needing to be bashed.
components
I'm pretty sure there is some genetic component towards intelligence.