Richard Dawkins - The Selfish Gene (1976)

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Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts which simply do not make evolutionary sense.

Richard Dawkins
It often turns out on closer inspection that acts of apparent altruism are really selfishness in disguise.

Richard Dawkins
When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.

Richard Dawkins
A retaliator behaves like a hawk when he is attacked by a hawk, and like a dove when he meets a dove. When he meets another retaliator he plays like a dove. A retaliator is a conditional strategist. His behaviour depends on the behaviour of his opponent.

Richard Dawkins
Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence. If superior creatures from space ever visit earth, the first question they will ask, in order to assess the level of our civilization, is: "Have they discovered evolution yet?"

Richard Dawkins
We no longer have to resort to superstition when faced with the deep problems: Is there a meaning to life? What are we for? What is man?

Richard Dawkins
… leaders who forbid their followers to use effective contraceptive methods … express a preference for "natural" methods of population limitation, and a natural method is exactly what they are going to get. It is called starvation.

Richard Dawkins
We are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.

Richard Dawkins
The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.

Richard Dawkins
Group selection theory would therefore predict a tendency to evolve towards an all-dove conspiracy … But the trouble with conspiracies, even those that are to everybody's advantage in the long run, is that they are open to abuse.

Richard Dawkins
The story of Doubting Thomas is told, not so that we shall admire Thomas, but so that we can admire the other apostles in comparison. Thomas demanded evidence … The other apostles, whose faith was so strong that they did not need evidence, are held to us as worthy of imitation.

Richard Dawkins
I am not advocating a morality based on evolution. I am saying how things have evolved. I am not saying how we humans morally ought to behave.

Richard Dawkins
But you cannot have an unnatural welfare state, unless you also have unnatural birth control, otherwise the end result will be misery even greater than that which obtains in nature.

Richard Dawkins