Richard Dawkins Evolution Quotations

Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun.

The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.

We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realize that we are apes.

Evolution has been observed. It's just that it hasn't been observed while it's happening.

You can't even begin to understand biology, you can't understand life, unless you understand what it's all there for, how it arose - and that means evolution.

Beliefs. Once entrenched in a culture, they persist, evolve and diverge, in a manner reminiscent of biological evolution.

Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born

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.

Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators. The watchmaker is blind

Along with William Shakespeare and Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin is Britain's greatest gift to the world. He was our greatest thinker.

Evolution is fundamentally hostile to religion.

Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.

Evolution is just a theory? Well, so is gravity and I don't see you jumping out of buildings.

Evolution never looks to the future.

Have they discovered evolution yet?

...there are no natural borderlines in evolution. The illusion of a borderline is created by the fact that the evolutionary intermediates happen to be extinct.

Even if it were true that evolution, or the teaching of evolution, encouraged immorality that would not imply that the theory of evolution was false.

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

We're going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.

If I were God wanting to make a human being, I would do it by a more direct way rather than by evolution. Why deliberately set it up in the one way which makes it look as though you don't exist?

There are very interesting controversies within evolution; however, whether evolution occurs is not one of them. It definitely does.