Quotes by Richard Dawkins

Рассмотрим представление о Боге. Мы не знаем, как оно возникло в мимофонде. Возможно, оно возникало многократно путем независимых «мутаций». Во всяком случае это очень старая идея. Как она реплицируется? С помощью устного и письменного слова, подкрепляемого великой музыкой и изобразительным искусством. Почему эта идея обладает такой высокой выживаемостью? Напомним, что в данном случае «выживаемость» означает не выживание гена в генофонде, а выживание мима в мимофонде. На самом деле вопрос состоит в следующем: в чем та «особость» идеи о Боге, которая придает ей такую стабильность и способность проникать в культурную среду? Выживаемость хорошего мима, входящего в мимофонд, обусловливается его большой психологической привлекательностью. Идея Бога дает на первый взгляд приемлемый ответ на глубокие и волнующие вопросы о смысле существования. Она позволяет надеяться, что несправедливость на этом свете может быть вознаграждена на том свете. «Всегда протянутые руки», готовые поддержать нас в минуты нашей слабости, которые, подобно плацебо, отнюдь не теряют своей действенности, хотя и существуют лишь в нашем воображении. Вот некоторые из причин, по которым идея Бога с такой готовностью копируется последовательными поколениями индивидуальных мозгов. Бог существует, пусть лишь в форме мима с высокой выживаемостью или инфекционностью, в среде, создаваемой человеческой культурой.

Science replaces private prejudice with public, verifiable evidence.

What matters is not the facts but how you discover and think about them.

Even those who do not, or cannot, avail themselves of a scientific education, choose to benefit from the technology that is made possible by the scientific education of others.

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.

Science is interesting, and if you dont agree you can fuc

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 wont 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.

Its been suggested that if the super-naturalists really had the powers they claim, theyd win the lottery every week. I prefer to point out that they could also win a Nobel Prize for discovering fundamental physical forces hitherto unknown to science. Either way, why are they wasting their talents doing party turns on television?By all means lets be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.

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. It is truly one of the things that make life worth living and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have for living is quite finite.

It has become almost a cliché 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.

DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.

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.

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.

A god who is capable of sending intelligible signals to millions of people simultaneously, and of receiving messages from all of them simultaneously, cannot be, whatever else he might be, simple. Such Bandwidth!

Individuals are not stable things, they are fleeting. Chromosomes too are shuffled into oblivion, like hands of cards soon after they are dealt. But the cards themselves survive the shuffling. The cards are the genes. The genes are not destroyed by crossing-over, they merely change partners and march on. Of course they march on. That is their business. They are the replicators and we are their survival machines. When we have served our purpose we are cast aside. But genes are denizens of geological time: genes are forever.

If the history-deniers who doubt the fact of evolution are ignorant of biology, those who think the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worse than ignorant, they are deluded to the point of perversity. They are denying not only the facts of biology but those of physics, geology, cosmology, archaeology, history and chemistry as well.

Human suffering has been caused because too many of us cannot grasp that words are only tools for our use.The mere presence in the dictionary of a word like living does not mean it necessarily has to refer to something definite in the real world.

Even if not a single fossil has ever been found, the evidence from surviving animals would still overwhelmingly force the conclusion that Darwin was right.

Presumably there is indeed no purpose in the ultimate fate of the cosmos, but do any of us really tie our lifes hopes to the ultimate fate of the cosmos anyway? Of course we dont; not if we are sane. Our lives are ruled by all sorts of closer, warmer, human ambitions and perceptions.

We think we know that chimpanzees are higher animals and earthworms are lower, we think weve always known what that means, and we think evolution makes it even clearer. But it doesnt. It is by no means clear that it means anything at all. Or if it means anything, it means so many different things to be misleading, even pernicious.