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Metaphors are fine if they aid understanding, but sometimes they get in the way.

Richard Dawkins

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Richard Dawkins
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: March 26
Actor
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Biologist
Epistemologist
Essayist
Ethologist
Evolutionary Biologist
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Kenya's capital
Clinton Richard Dawkins
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C. Richard Dawkins
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Sometimes
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Metaphors
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Understanding

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We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
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I am agnostic only to the extent that I am agnostic about fairies at the bottom of the garden
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I think a fundamentalist is somebody who believes something unshakably and isn't going to change their mind.
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We accept that people are irrational for good Darwinian reasons. But I don't think we should be so pessimistic as to think that therefore we're forever condemned to be irrational.
Richard Dawkins
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We have sexual lust even though we know perfectly well that, because we're using contraception, it is not going to result in the propagation of our genes. That doesn't matter, because the lust was built into our brains at a time when there was no contraception.
Richard Dawkins
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The true scientific understanding of the nature of existence is so utterly fascinating how could you not want people to share it? Carl Sagan, I think, said 'when you're in love, you want to tell the world.' And who, on understanding a scientific view of reality, would not, as it were, fall in love and want to tell the world.
Richard Dawkins
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Evolution is fundamentally hostile to religion.
Richard Dawkins
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The time has come for people of reason to say: Enough is Enough! Religious faith discourages independent thought, it's divisive and it's dangerous.
Richard Dawkins
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I think the world's always a better place if people are filled with understanding.
Richard Dawkins
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It's very likely that most mammals have consciousness, and probably birds, too.
Richard Dawkins
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We animals are the most complicated things in the known universe.
Richard Dawkins
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I could easily believe that religion could enhance health and hence survival, and that therefore there could be indeed be literally Darwinian survival value, Darwinian selection in favor of religion. None of that of course bears at all upon the truth value of the claims made by religions.
Richard Dawkins
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We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realise that we are apes. Our common ancestor with the chimpanzees and gorillas is much more recent than their common ancestor with the Asian apes - the gibbons and orangutans. There is no natural category that includes chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans but excludes humans.
Richard Dawkins
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Human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.
Richard Dawkins
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If circumcision has any justification AT ALL, it should be medical only. Parents' religion is the worst of all reasons - pure child abuse.
Richard Dawkins
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Faith rests squarely upon reason, but with the added component of revelation.
Richard Dawkins
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We should take astrology seriously. No, I don't mean we should believe in it. I am talking about fighting it seriously instead of humouring it as a piece of harmless fun.
Richard Dawkins
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Genome sequencing has changed taxonomy.
Richard Dawkins
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Any entity capable of intelligently designing something as improbable as Dutchman's Pipe (or a universe) would have to be even more improbable than a Dutchman's Pipe. Far from terminating the vicious regress, God aggravates it with a vengeance.
Richard Dawkins
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A delusion is something that people believe in despite a total lack of evidence.
Richard Dawkins