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Richard Dawkins Richard Dawkins is an eminent British ethologist, evolutionary theorist, and popular science writer who holds the Charles Simonyi Chair in the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. Dawkins first came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene which popularised the gene-centric view of evolution, and introduced the terms meme and memetics into the lexicon. In 1982, he made a major original contribution to the science of evolution with the theory, presented in his book The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene, that phenotypic effects are not limited to an organism's body but can stretch far into the environment, including the bodies of other organisms. He has since written several best-selling popular books on evolution including The Blind Watchmaker: Why Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design, The God Delusion, A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love, Climbing Mount Improbable, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life, and The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgriate to the Dawn of Life. Dawkins appeared in a number of television programmes on evolutionary biology, creationism, and religion. He is an atheist, humanist, skeptic, "bright," and – as a commentator on science, religion and politics – is among the English-speaking world's best known public intellectuals.
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Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science
Richard Dawkins Quotes It may be that brain hardware has co-evolved with the internal virtual worlds that it creates. This can be called hardware-software co-evolution. You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being. Aristotle was an encyclopedic polymath, an all time intellect. Yet not only can you know more than him about the world. You also can have a deeper understanding of how everything works. Such is the privilege of living after Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick and their colleagues. For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria. If you want to do evil, science provides the most powerful weapons to do evil; but equally, if you want to do good, science puts into your hands the most powerful tools to do so. The trick is to want the right things, then science will provide you with the most effective methods of achieving them. 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. It's been suggested that if the supernaturalists really had the powers they claim, they'd win the lottery every week. I prefer to point out that they could also win a Nobel Prize for discovering fundamental physical forces hitherto unknown to science. Either way, why are they wasting their talents doing party turns on television? I suspect that today if you asked people to justify their belief in god, the dominant reason would be scientific. Most people, I believe, think that you need a god to explain the existence of the world, and especially the existence of life. They are wrong, but our education system is such that many people don't know it. Out of all of the sects in the world, we notice an uncanny coincidence: the overwhelming majority just happen to choose the one that their parents belong to. Not the sect that has the best evidence in its favour, the best miracles, the best moral code, the best cathedral, the best stained glass, the best music: when it comes to choosing from the smorgasbord of available religions, their potential virtues seem to count for nothing, compared to the matter of heredity. This is an unmistakable fact; nobody could seriously deny it. Yet people with full knowledge of the arbitrary nature of this heredity, somehow manage to go on believing in their religion, often with such fanaticism that they are prepared to murder people who follow a different one. Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence. Most of what we strive for in our modern life uses the apparatus of goal seeking that was originally set up to seek goals in the state of nature. You see, if you say something positive like the whole of life – all living things – is descended from a single common ancestor which lived about 4,000 million years ago and that we are all cousins, well that is an exceedingly important and true thing to say and that is what I want to say. Somebody who is religious sees that as threatening and so I am represented as attacking religion, and I am forced into responding to their reaction. But you do not have to see my main purpose as attacking religion. Certainly I see the scientific view of the world as incompatible with religion, but that is not what is interesting about it. It is also incompatible with magic, but that also is not worth stressing. What is interesting about the scientific world view is that it is true, inspiring, remarkable and that it unites a whole lot of phenomena under a single heading. And that is what is so exciting for me.
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