Richard Dawkins - The Selfish Gene (1976)

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No doubt some of your cousins and great-uncles died in childhood, but not a single one of your ancestors did. Ancestors just don't die young!

Richard Dawkins
Genes do indirectly control the manufacture of bodies, and the influence is strictly one way: acquired characteristics are not inherited. No matter how much knowledge and wisdom you acquire during your life, not one jot will be passed on to your children by genetic means. Each new generation starts from scratch.

Richard Dawkins
… a gene might be able to assist replicas of itself that are sitting in other bodies. If so, this would appear as individual altruism but it would be brought about by gene selfishness.

Richard Dawkins
Unfortunately, however much we may deplore something, it does not stop being true.

Richard Dawkins
God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture.

Richard Dawkins
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
… a lion wants to eat an antelope's body, but the antelope has very different plans for its body. This is not normally regarded as competition for a resource, but logically it is hard to see why not.

Richard Dawkins
What is the selfish gene? It is not just one single physical bit of DNA. Just as in the primeval soup, it is all replicas of a particular bit of DNA, distributed throughout the world.

Richard Dawkins
Elizabeth II is a direct descendant of William the Conqueror. Yet it is quite probable that she bares not a single one of the old king's genes.

Richard Dawkins
You can make some inferences about a man's character if you know something about the conditions in which he has survived and prospered.

Richard Dawkins
What really happens is that the gene pool becomes filled with genes that influence bodies in such a way that they behave 'as if' they made complex, if unconscious, cost/benefit calculations

Richard Dawkins
Whenever a system of communication evolves, there is always the danger that some will exploit the system for their own ends.

Richard Dawkins
… it is certainly wrong to condemn poor old Homo Sapiens as the only species to kill his own kind, the only inheritor of the mark of Cain, and similar melodramatic charges.

Richard Dawkins
The truth is that all examples of child protection and parental care, and all associated bodily organs … are examples of the working in nature of the kin-selection principle.

Richard Dawkins
The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes.

Richard Dawkins
Our brains are separate and independent enough from our genes to rebel against them.. we do so in a small way everytime we use contraception. There is no reason why we should not rebel in a large way too.

Richard Dawkins
Survival machines that can simulate the future are one jump ahead of survival machines that who can only learn of the basis of trial and error. The trouble with overt trial is that it takes time and energy. The trouble with overt error is that it is often fatal.... The evolution of the capacity to simulate seems to have culminated in subjective consciousness. Why this should have happened is, to me, the most profound mystery facing modern biology.

Richard Dawkins
Faith is powerful enough to immunize people against all appeals to pity, to forgiveness, to decent human feelings. It even immunizes them against fear, if they honestly believe that a martyr's death will send them straight to heaven.

Richard Dawkins
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
If we want to know where the truth lies in particular cases, we have to
look.

Richard Dawkins
The account of the origin of life that I shall give is necessarily speculative; by definition, nobody was around to see what happened.

Richard Dawkins
All life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities.

Richard Dawkins
They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.

Richard Dawkins
The genes are the master programmers, and they are programming for their lives.

Richard Dawkins
Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have a chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do.

Richard Dawkins
[It] is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.

Richard Dawkins
It is normally possible to be much more certain who your children are than who your brothers are. And you can be more certain still who you yourself are!

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

Richard Dawkins
Any altruistic system is inherently unstable, because it is open to abuse by selfish individuals, ready to exploit it.

Richard Dawkins
Personally, I rather look forward to a computer program winning the world chess championship. Humanity needs a lesson in humility.

Richard Dawkins