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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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Richard Dawkins
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: March 26
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Evolutionary Biologist
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Kenya's capital
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More quotes by Richard Dawkins

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There is a tendency for people to say evolution is only a theory. That is inappropriate.
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'Take offense at the drop of a hat' is the unwritten eleventh commandment.
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We have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully 'designed' to have come into existence by chance.
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There's nothing nonsensical about saying that what would evolve if Darwinian selection has its head is something that you don't want to happen. And I could easily imagine trying to go against Darwinism.
Richard Dawkins
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We who are atheists are also a-fairyists, a-teapotists, and a-unicornists, but we don't have to bother saying so.
Richard Dawkins
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If you are asking me if my more global purpose is a battle against religion, it is.
Richard Dawkins
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Thus the creationist's favourite question What is the use of half an eye? Actually, this is a lightweight question, a doddle to answer. Half an eye is just 1 per cent better than 49 per cent of an eye.
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Certainly science should continue to see whether we can find evidence for multiverses that might explain why our own universe seems to be so finely tuned.
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What Francis [Collins] was just saying about Genesis was, of course, a little private quarrel between him and his Fundamentalist colleagues. It would be unseemly for me to enter in except to suggest that he'd save himself an awful lot of trouble if he just simply ceased to give them the time of day.
Richard Dawkins
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There is a whole field of inquiry that has come up in the last 30 or 40 years - some call it sociobiology or evolutionary psychology - relating to where we get our moral sense and why we value the idea of altruism, and locating both answers in behavioral adaptations for the preservation of our genes.
Richard Dawkins
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[Richard Leakey is] a robust hero of a man, who actually lives up to the cliché, “a big man in every sense of the word.” Like other big men he is loved by many, feared by some, and not over-preoccupied with the judgments of any.
Richard Dawkins
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If a healing technique is demonstrated to have curative properties in properly controlled double-blind trials, it ceases to be alternative. It simply, as Diamond explains, becomes medicine.
Richard Dawkins
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The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has shown great courage, in the face of spiteful vested interests, in demonstrating how easy it is for people to concoct memories that are entirely false but which seem, to the victim, every bit as real as true memories.
Richard Dawkins
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Not only is science corrosive to religion, but religion is corrosive to science. It teaches people to be satisfied with trivial non-explanations and blinds them to the wonderful real explanations that we have within our grasp.
Richard Dawkins
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That was unfortunate. I should have compared religion with religion and compared Islam not with Trinity College but with Jews, because the number of Jews who have won Nobel Prizes is phenomenally high.
Richard Dawkins
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My God is not improbable to me. He has no need of a creation story for himself or to be fine-tuned by something else.
Richard Dawkins
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If there is something that appears to lie beyond the natural world as it is now imperfectly understood, we hope to eventually understand it and embrace it within the natural. As ever when we unweave a rainbow, it will not become less wonderful.
Richard Dawkins
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I am an enthusiastic Darwinian, but I think Darwinism is too big a theory to be confined to the narrow context of the gene.
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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The fact that somebody does good doesn't make their beliefs true.
Richard Dawkins