Richard Dawkins - The Blind Watchmaker (1986)

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Nowadays theologians aren't quite so straightforward as Paley. They don't point to complex living mechanisms and say that they are self-evidently designed by a creator, just like a watch. But there is a tendency to point to them and say 'It is impossible to believe' that such complexity, or such perfection, could have evolved by natural selection. Whenever I read such a remark, I always feel like writing 'Speak for yourself' in the margin.

Richard Dawkins
However many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead.

Richard Dawkins
Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.

Richard Dawkins
Evolution normally does not come to a halt, but constantly 'tracks' the changing environment.

Richard Dawkins
Human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.

Richard Dawkins
Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind's eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.

Richard Dawkins
Contrary to earlier prejudices, there is nothing inherently progressive about evolution.

Richard Dawkins
Things exist either because they have recently come into existence or because they have qualities that made them unlikely to be destroyed in the past.

Richard Dawkins
There are people in the world who desperately want not to have to believe in Darwinism.

Richard Dawkins
A bat is a machine, whose internal electronics are so wired up that its wing muscles cause it to home in on insects, as an unconscious guided missile homes in on an aeroplane.

Richard Dawkins
We have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully 'designed' to have come into existence by chance.

Richard Dawkins
Effective searching procedures become, when the search-space is sufficiently large, indistinguishable from true creativity.

Richard Dawkins
Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose

Richard Dawkins
If you don't know anything about computers, just remember that they are machines that do exactly what you tell them but often surprise you in the result.

Richard Dawkins
The idea of tiny changes cumulated over many steps is an immensely powerful idea, capable of explaining an enormous range of things that would be otherwise inexplicable.

Richard Dawkins
Explaining is a difficult art. You can explain something so that your reader understands the words; and you can explain something so that the reader feels it in the marrow of his bones. To do the latter, it sometimes isn't enough to lay the evidence before the reader in a dispassionate way. You have to become an advocate and use the tricks of the advocate's trade.

Richard Dawkins
The thing that defines a species is that all members have the same addressing system for their DNA.

Richard Dawkins
The Darwinian theory is in principle capable of explaining life. No other theory that has ever been suggested is in principle capable of explaining life.

Richard Dawkins
There is enough information capacity in a single human cell to store the Encyclopedia Britannica, all 30 volumes of it, three or four times over.

Richard Dawkins
DNA is ROM. It can be read millions of times over, but only written to once - when it is first assembled the birth of the cell in which it resides.

Richard Dawkins
For Darwin, any evolution that had to be helped over the jumps by God was no evolution at all. It made a nonsense of the central point of evolution.

Richard Dawkins
The physicist's problem is the problem of ultimate origins and ultimate natural laws. The biologist's problem is the problem of complexity.

Richard Dawkins
Words are our servants, not our masters. For different purposes, we find it convenient to use words in different senses.

Richard Dawkins
But, however many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead, or rather not alive.

Richard Dawkins
The resemblance of the signs of the zodiac to the animals after which they are named... is as unimpressive as the predictions of astrologers.

Richard Dawkins
Our own existence once presented the greatest of all mysteries, but... it is a mystery no longer because it is solved. Darwin and Wallace solved it... I was surprised that so many people seemed not only unaware of the elegant and beautiful solution to this deepest of problems but, incredibly, in many cases actually unaware that there was a problem in the first place!

Richard Dawkins
The important thing to remember about mathematics is not to be frightened

Richard Dawkins
I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one.

Richard Dawkins
Our subjective judgment of what seems like a good bet is irrelevant to what is actually a good bet.

Richard Dawkins
It is almost as if the human brain were specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism, and to find it hard to believe

Richard Dawkins