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My decision to be a scientist was a bit of a drift really, more or less by default.

Richard Dawkins

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Richard Dawkins
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: March 26
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More quotes by Richard Dawkins

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It is important not to confuse race and religion.
Richard Dawkins
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The body is a survival machine programmed to propagate the genes that reside inside it.
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I do like Philip Pullman.And that's an exception because Philip Pullman's books allow magic.
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Sometimes I think it's possible to mistake desire for clarity and talking in a no-nonsense way for aggression.
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Religious faith, is a state of mind, that leads people to believe in something, it doesn't matter what, without a whisper of doubt, or a whiff of evidence, and believe so strongly in some cases, that they are prepare to kill and die for it, without the need for further justification.
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Very close cousins like humans and chimps have almost all their genes in common. Slightly less close cousins like humans and monkeys still have recognizably the same genes. You could carry on right on down to humans and bacteria, and you will find continuous compelling evidence for the hierarchical tree of cousinship.
Richard Dawkins
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The less you think, the more you believe.
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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In a way, I think religion is to be admired for asking the right questions. I just think it's got the wrong answers.
Richard Dawkins
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Gould carried the art of bending over backward to positively supine lengths. Why shouldn't we comment on God, as scientists? ... A universe with a creative superintendent would be a very different kind of universe from one without. Why is that not a scientific matter?
Richard Dawkins
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It is almost as if the human brain were specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism, and to find it hard to believe
Richard Dawkins
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Professor Challenger, Conan Doyle's science hero, was a sort of irascible man constantly bellowing at people, so he was a little bit of a departure from both of those stereotypes.
Richard Dawkins
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The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable.
Richard Dawkins
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I accept that there may be things far grander and more incomprehensible than we can possibly imagine.
Richard Dawkins
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It is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the threat to humanity posed by the AIDS virus, mad cow disease, and many others, but I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.
Richard Dawkins
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Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators. The watchmaker is blind
Richard Dawkins
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I personally would go further and say that, if your morality is based, as mine is, on a desire to increase the sum of happiness and reduce suffering, the decision to deliberately give birth to a Down baby, when you have the choice to abort it early in the pregnancy, might actually be immoral from the point of view of the child’s own welfare.
Richard Dawkins
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I've never heard of William Craig. A debate with him might look good on his resume, but it wouldn't look good on mine!
Richard Dawkins
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Suppose that there's a gene that makes you gay if you were bottle-fed but that has some completely different effect if you were breast-fed. So in the days before bottles were invented that gene would not have manifested itself as gay behavior, but now that bottles are common it can do so.
Richard Dawkins
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Barring a theoretical resolution, which I think is unlikely, you either have to say there are zillions of parallel universes out there that we can't observe at present or you have to say there was a plan. I actually find the argument of the existence of a God who did the planning more compelling than the bubbling of all these multiverses.
Richard Dawkins