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Richard Dawkins Quotes about Science

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Nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply

Nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous-indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.

Richard Dawkins
Nature, Learning, Science
Richard Dawkins (1995). “River out of eden: a Darwinian view of life”, Basic Books (AZ)

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.

Richard Dawkins
Life, Science, Dna

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.

Richard Dawkins
Ignorance, Knowledge, Science
"The Richard Dimbleby Lecture: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder". Lecture, BBC1 Television, November 12, 1996.

Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distance target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection, although human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.

Richard Dawkins
Distance, Science, Vanity
Richard Dawkins (2015). “The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design”, p.58, W. W. Norton & Company

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.

Richard Dawkins
Selfish, Science, Survival
1976 The Selfish Gene, ch.2.

Religion shows a pattern of heredity which I think is similar to genetic heredity. ... There are hundreds of different religious sects, and every religious person is loyal to just one of these. ... The overwhelming majority just happen to choose the one their parents belonged to. Not the sect that has the best evidence in its favour, the best miracles, the best moral code, the best cathedral, the best stained-glass, the best music when it comes to choosing from the smorgasbord of available religions, their potential virtues seem to count for nothing compared to the matter of heredity.

Richard Dawkins
Religious, Science, Thinking

People who believe the earth was created 6000 years ago, when it's actually 4.5 billion years old, should also believe the width of North America is 8 yards. That is the scale of the error.

Richard Dawkins
Believe, Science, Errors

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.

Richard Dawkins
Selfish, Mean, Science
"The Evolutionary Future of Man". The Economist, Septermber 11, 1993.

Chaos theory, a more recent invention, is equally fertile ground for those with a bent for abusing sense. It is unfortunately named, for 'chaos' implies randomness. Chaos in the technical sense is not random at all. It is completely determined, but it depends hugely, in strangely hard-to-predict ways, on tiny differences in initial conditions.

Richard Dawkins
Science, Differences, Way
Richard Dawkins (2017). “Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist”, p.87, Random House

It is possible to enjoy the Mozart concerto without being able to play the clarinet. In fact, you can learn to be an expert connoisseur of music without being able to play a note on any instrument. Of course, music would come to a halt if nobody ever learned to play it. But if everybody grew up thinking that music was synonymous with playing it, think how relatively impoverished many lives would be. Couldn't we learn to think of science in the same way?

Richard Dawkins
Science, Thinking, Play

Five per cent vision is better than no vision at all. Five per cent hearing is better than no hearing at all. Five per cent flight efficiency is better than no flight at all. It is thoroughly believable that every organ or apparatus that we actually see is the product of a smooth trajectory through animal space, a trajectory in which every intermediate stage assisted survival and reproduction.

Richard Dawkins
Science, Animal, Space
Richard Dawkins (2015). “The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design”, p.96, W. W. Norton & Company

The essence of life is statistical improbability on a colossal scale.

Richard Dawkins
Life, Science, Reality
The Blind Watchmaker Chapter 11

In true natural selection, if a body has what it takes to survive, its genes automatically survive because they are inside it. So the genes that survive tend to be, automatically, those genes that confer on bodies the qualities that assist them to survive.

Richard Dawkins
Science, Survival, Quality
Richard Dawkins (2015). “The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design”, p.65, W. W. Norton & Company

Part of the appeal was that Medawar was not only a Nobel Laureate, but he seemed like a Nobel Laureate; he was everything one thought a Nobel Laureate ought to be. If you have ever wondered why scientists like Popper, try Medawar's exposition. Actually most Popperian scientists have probably never tried reading anything but Medawar's exposition.

Richard Dawkins
Reading, Science, Trying

Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that.

Richard Dawkins
Science, People, Religion
"Has the world changed?". The Guardian Interview, www.theguardian.com. October 11, 2001.

The physicist's problem is the problem of ultimate origins and ultimate natural laws. The biologist's problem is the problem of complexity.

Richard Dawkins
Science, Law, Problem
Richard Dawkins (2015). “The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design”, p.26, W. W. Norton & Company

So it is best to keep an open mind and be agnostic. At first sight that seems an unassailable position, at least in the weak sense of Pascal's wager. But on second thoughts it seems a cop-out, because the same could be said of Father Christmas and tooth fairies. There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?

Richard Dawkins
Atheist, Father, Science
Speech at the Edinburgh International Science Festival, April 15, 1992.

But, however many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead, or rather not alive.

Richard Dawkins
Life, Death, Science
1986 The Blind Watchmaker, ch.1.

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.

Richard Dawkins
Science, Wildlife, Vices

Religion ends and philosophy begins, just as alchemy ends and chemistry begins, and astrology ends and astronomy begins.

Richard Dawkins
Philosophy, Science, Astrology

We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. 'Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene'. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to 'memory', or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with 'cream'.

Richard Dawkins
Memories, Science, Names
Richard Dawkins (2016). “The Selfish Gene: 40th Anniversary edition”, p.249, Oxford University Press

Our own existence once presented the greatest of all mysteries, but ... it is a mystery no longer because it is solved. Darwin and Wallace solved it ... I was surprised that so many people seemed not only unaware of the elegant and beautiful solution to this deepest of problems but, incredibly, in many cases actually unaware that there was a problem in the first place!

Richard Dawkins
Beautiful, Science, People
Richard Dawkins (2015). “The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design”, p.7, W. W. Norton & Company