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Real life seeks the gentle slopes at the back of Mount Improbable, while creationists are blind to all but the daunting precipice at the front.

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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Scientific truth is too beautiful to be sacrificed for the sake of light entertainment or money. Astrology is an aesthetic affront. It cheapens astronomy, like using Beethoven for commercial jingles.
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Physicists have come up with other explanations. One is to say that these six constants are not free to vary. Some unified theory will eventually show that they are as locked in as the circumference and the diameter of a circle. That reduces the odds of them all independently just happening to fit the bill.
Richard Dawkins
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Cloning may be good and it may be bad. Probably it's a bit of both. The question must not be greeted with reflex hysteria but decided quietly, soberly and on its own merits. We need less emotion and more thought.
Richard Dawkins
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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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I mean I think that when you've got a big brain, when you find yourself planted in a world with a brain big enough to understand quite a lot of what you see around you, but not everything, you naturally fall to thinking about the deep mysteries. Where do we come from? Where does the world come from? Where does the universe come from?
Richard Dawkins
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Genome sequencing has changed taxonomy.
Richard Dawkins
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People who believe in something for which there is not a shred of evidence act on that belief and, above all, impose their beliefs on others, they make me cross, and they make me especially cross when they impose their beliefs on defenceless children.
Richard Dawkins
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It really comes down to parsimony, economy of explanation. It is possible that your car engine is driven by psychokinetic energy, but if it looks like a petrol engine, smells like a petrol engine and performs exactly as well as a petrol engine, the sensible working hypothesis is that it is a petrol engine.
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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All qualified physicists, biologists, cosmologists and geologists agree, on the basis of massive, mutually corroborating evidence, that the earth's age is at least four billion years.
Richard Dawkins
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Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think.
Richard Dawkins
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I think Douglas [Adams] is writing with an eye to irony for adults at the same time as entertaining children.
Richard Dawkins
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I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.
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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I am utterly fed up with the respect we have been brainwashed into bestowing upon religion.
Richard Dawkins
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I think from my point of view - I won't say it doesn't matter whether [Darwinian explanations] are right or wrong, it's just sufficient in some cases, for me, to be able to say, Well, at least it's not totally implausible from a Darwinian point of view.
Richard Dawkins
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We don't need fossils - the case for evolution is watertight without them so it is paradoxical to use gaps in the fossil record as though they were evidence against evolution
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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Whenever conditions arise in which a new kind of replicator can make copies of itself, the new replicators will tend to take over, and start a new kind of evolution of their own. Once this new evolution begins, it will in no necessary sense be subservient to the old.
Richard Dawkins
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The feature of living matter that most demands explanation is that it is almost unimaginably complicated in directions that convey a powerful illusion of deliberate design.
Richard Dawkins