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
selfish vanity goal
Human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.
selfish mean science
Scientific and technological progress themselves are value-neutral. They are just very good at doing what they do. If you want to do selfish, greedy, intolerant and violent things, scientific technology will provide you with by far the most efficient way of doing so. But if you want to do good, to solve the world's problems, to progress in the best value-laden sense, once again, there is no better means to those ends than the scientific way.
selfish opposites society
Mutation is random; natural selection is the very opposite of random.
atheist thinking self
The atheist view is correspondingly life-affirming and life-enhancing, while at the same time never being tainted with self-delusion, wishful thinking, or the whingeing self-pity of those who feel that life owes them something.
life children self
What are all of us but self-reproducing robots? We have been put together by our genes and what we do is roam the world looking for a way to sustain ourselves and ultimately produce another robot child.
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.
selfish philosophical thought-provoking
Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.
life dna self
We are machines built by DNA whose purpose is to make more copies of the same DNA. ... This is exactly what we are for. We are machines for propagating DNA, and the propagation of DNA is a self-sustaining process. It is every living object's sole reason for living.
selfish sacrifice benefits
What you cannot have is a gene that sacrifices itself for the benefit of other genes. What you can have is a gene that makes organisms sacrifice themselves for other organisms under the influence of selfish genes.
selfish generosity design
Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do.
selfishness disguise inspection
It often turns out on closer inspection that acts of apparent altruism are really selfishness in disguise.
selfish evil design
If the universe were just electrons and selfish genes, meaningless tragedies ... are exactly what we should expect, along with equally meaningless good fortune. Such a universe would be neither evil nor good in intention ... The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.
selfish earth rebel
We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.
selfish abuse individual
Any altruistic system is inherently unstable, because it is open to abuse by selfish individuals, ready to exploit it.