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Evolution is not a genetically controlled distortion of one adult form into another it is a genetically controlled alteration in a developmental program.

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
Geneticist
Science Communicator
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Kenya's capital
Clinton Richard Dawkins
Clinton Dawkins
C. Richard Dawkins
C. Dawkins
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Adult
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Evolution
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Distortion

More quotes by Richard Dawkins

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Most of the ones [Nobel prizes] that have gone to Muslims have been peace prizes, and the [number of Muslims] who have gotten them for scientific work is exceedingly low. But in Jews, it is exceedingly high.
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Religious people split into three main groups when faced with science. I shall label them the know-nothings, the know-alls, and the no-contests.
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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
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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.
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In the beginning was simplicity.
Richard Dawkins
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You believe that all humanity came from Adam and Eve, and humans have not evolved at all since. So tell me between the two of them, which was black, which was white, and which was Asian?
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'Take offense at the drop of a hat' is the unwritten eleventh commandment.
Richard Dawkins
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The hypothesis of God offers no worthwhile explanation for anything, for it simply postulates what we are trying to explain.
Richard Dawkins
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Presumably what happened to Jesus was what happens to all of us when we die. We decompose. Accounts of Jesus's resurrection and ascension are about as well-documented as Jack and the Beanstalk.
Richard Dawkins
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I get the feeling more and more that religion is being left behind.
Richard Dawkins
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The rule of thumb based into the brain by natural selection would not have been, Be nice to your kin and be nice to potential reciprocators. It would have been, Be nice to everybody, because everybody would have been included.
Richard Dawkins
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The present Luddism over genetic engineering may die a natural death as the computer-illiterate generation is superseded.... I fear that, if the green movement's high-amplitude warnings over GMOs turn out to be empty, people will be dangerously disinclined to listen to other and more serious warnings.
Richard Dawkins
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Each step is not too improbable for us to countenance, but when you add them up cumulatively over millions of years, you get these monsters of improbability, like the human brain and the rain forest. It should warn us against ever again assuming that because something is complicated, God must have done it.
Richard Dawkins
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Natural selection is anything but random.
Richard Dawkins
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Luke [the gospel writer] screws up his dating by tactlessly mentioning events that historians are capable of independently checking. There was indeed a census under Governor Quirinius - a local census, not one decreed by Caesar Augustus for the Empire as a whole - but it happened too late in 6 AD, long after Herod's death.
Richard Dawkins
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If it suits [God] to be a deity that we must seek without being forced to, would it not have been sensible for him to use the mechanism of evolution without posting obvious road signs to reveal his role in creation?
Richard Dawkins
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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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It's very important to try to inculcate into children moral rules, such as do as you would be done by.
Richard Dawkins
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What I am skeptical about is the idea that whatever wonderful revelation does come in the science of the future, it will turn out to be one of the particular historical religions that people happen to have dreamed up.
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