Richard Dawkins

Oxygen flooded into the atmosphere as a pollutant, even a poison, until natural selection shaped living things to thrive on the stuff and, indeed, suffocate without it.

[W]e may now be on the threshold of a new kind of genetic takeover. DNA replicators built 'survival machines' for themselves _ the bodies of living organisms including ourselves. As part of their equipment, bodies evolved onboard computers _ brains. Brains evolved the capacity to communicate with other brains by means of language and cultural traditions. But the new milieu of cultural tradition opens up new possibilities for self-replicating entities. The new replicators are not DNA and they are not 158 The Blind Watchmaker clay crystals. They are patterns of information that can thrive only in brains or the artificially manufactured products of brains _ books, computers, and so on. But, given that brains, books and computers exist, these new replicators, which I called memes to distinguish them from genes, can propagate themselves from brain to brain, from brain to book, from book to brain, from brain to computer, from computer to computer.

[W]e may now be on the threshold of a new kind of genetic takeover. DNA replicators built 'survival machines' for themselves _ the bodies of living organisms including ourselves. As part of their equipment, bodies evolved onboard computers _ brains. Brains evolved the capacity to communicate with other brains by means of language and cultural traditions. But the new milieu of cultural tradition opens up new possibilities for self-replicating entities. The new replicators are not DNA and they are not clay crystals. They are patterns of information that can thrive only in brains or the artificially manufactured products of brains _ books, computers, and so on. But, given that brains, books and computers exist, these new replicators, which I called memes to distinguish them from genes, can propagate themselves from brain to brain, from brain to book, from book to brain, from brain to computer, from computer to computer.

It requires a deliberate mental effort to turn biology the right way up again, and remind ourselves that the replicators come first, in importance as well as in history.

It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that).

Evolution by natural selection is the explanation for why we exist. It is not something to guide our lives in our own society. If we were to be guided by the evolution principle, then we would be living in a kind of ultra-Thatcherite, Reaganite society.___tudy your Darwinism for two reasons,_ he implored, __ecause it explains why you__e here, and the second reason is, study your Darwinism in order to learn what to avoid in setting up society. What we need is a truly anti-Darwinian society. Anti-Darwinian in the sense that we don__ wish to live in a society where the weakest go to the wall, where the strongest suppress the weak, and even kill the weak. We _ I, at least _ do not wish to live in that kind of society. I want to live in the sort of society where we take care of the sick, where we take care of the weak, take care of the oppressed, which is a very anti-Darwinian society.

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.

If the second dinosaur to the left of the tall cycad tree had not happened to sneeze and thereby fail to catch the tiny, shrew-like ancestor of all the mammals, we should none of us be here.

The chicken is only an egg__ way for making another egg.

Evolution by natural selection is the explanation for why we exist. It is not something to guide our lives in our own society. If we were to be guided by the evolution principle, then we would be living in a kind of ultra-Thatcherite, Reaganite society.Study your Darwinism for two reasons - because it explains why you__e here, and the second reason is, study your Darwinism in order to learn what to avoid in setting up society. What we need is a truly anti-Darwinian society. Anti-Darwinian in the sense that we don__ wish to live in a society where the weakest go to the wall, where the strongest suppress the weak, and even kill the weak. We _ I, at least _ do not wish to live in that kind of society. I want to live in the sort of society where we take care of the sick, where we take care of the weak, take care of the oppressed, which is a very anti-Darwinian society.

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

Evolution could so easily be disproved if just a single fossil turned up in the wrong date order. Evolution has passed this test with flying colours.

I am an enthusiastic Darwinian, but I think Darwinism is too big a theory to be confined to the narrow context of the gene.

If God wanted to forgive our sins, why not just forgive them, without having himself tortured and executed in payment__hereby, incidentally, condemning remote future generations of Jews to pogroms and persecution as 'Christ-killers': did that hereditary sin pass down in the semen too?

_the Genesis story is just one that happened to have been adopted by one particular tribe of Middle Eastern herders. It has no more special status than the belief of a particular West African tribe that the world was created from the excrement of ants.

There was something built into the human brain by natural selection which was once useful, and which now manifests itself as religion.

Either blasphemy is a victimless crime or its victim is powerful enough to take care of himself without any help from you.

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.