Richard Dawkins
quotations and quotes
Science Darwin & Evolution
We hope that you will enjoy these variously interesting, amusing and perceptive quotations and quotes from Richard Dawkins about
Science Darwin and Evolution and other topics.
"There is an anaesthetic of familiarity, a sedative of ordinariness which dulls the senses and hides the wonder of existence. For those of us not
gifted in poetry, it is at least worth while from time to time making an effort to shake off the anaesthetic. What is the best way of countering
the sluggish habitutation brought about by our gradual crawl from babyhood? We can't actually fly to another planet. But we can recapture
that sense of having just tumbled out to life on a new world by looking at our own world in unfamiliar ways."
— Richard Dawkins (Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder)
It has become almost a cliche to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast
ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics.
"The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable.
It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver."
— Richard Dawkins
The fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved out of literally nothing,
is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice.
"After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with
colour, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn't it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief
time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I
am asked -- as I am surprisingly often -- why I bother to get up in the mornings. To put it the other way round, isn't
it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed,
eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be a part of it?"
— Richard Dawkins
"The world and the universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more we understand about it the more beautiful does it appear."
— Richard Dawkins
"You could give Aristotle a tutorial and you could thrill him to the core of his being. Aristotle was an encyclopedic polymath, an all
time intellect, yet not only can you know more than him about the world, you also can have a deeper understanding of how everything
works. Such is the privilege of living after Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick and their colleagues."
— Richard Dawkins
For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions
of cells is a colony of bacteria.
"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."
— Richard Dawkins
The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the
existence of organized complexity.
Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun.
Evolution could so easily be disproved if just a single fossil turned up in the wrong date order. Evolution has passed this test
with flying colours.
- Richard Dawkins (The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution)
"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.
The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains
of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because
the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying
odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here."
"The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me
to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear,
others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease.
It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until
the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and
genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it,
nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no
purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference."
— Richard Dawkins (River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life)
"...when two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them.
It is possible for one side to be simply wrong."
Personally, I rather look forward to a computer program winning the world chess championship. Humanity needs a lesson in humility.
The Faith versus Reason Debate is not over
If Charles Darwin were alive today we at Age-of-the-Sage would be urgently seeking to interest him
in our discovery of the fact that there is close agreement between several major World Faiths, Plato,
Socrates, Pythagoras and Shakespeare in suggesting that Human Wisdom / Spirituality is relative to
Human Desire / Materialism and to Human Wrath / Ethnicity.
Psychological science seems to agree with these more philosophical and intuitive authorities!
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