Richard Dawkins Quotes About Survival
-
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.
→ -
Nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous-indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.
→ -
In true natural selection, if a body has what it takes to survive, its genes automatically survive because they are inside it. So the genes that survive tend to be, automatically, those genes that confer on bodies the qualities that assist them to survive.
→ -
God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture.
→ -
Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators. The watchmaker is blind
→ -
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.
→ -
I doubt that religion can survive deep understanding. The shallows are its natural habitat. Cranks and fundamentalists are too often victimised as scapegoats for religion in general. It is only quite recently that Christianity reinvented itself in non-fundamentalist guise, and Islam has yet to do so.
→ -
I could easily believe that religion could enhance health and hence survival, and that therefore there could be indeed be literally Darwinian survival value, Darwinian selection in favor of religion. None of that of course bears at all upon the truth value of the claims made by religions.
→ -
Individuals are not stable things, they are fleeting. Chromosomes too are shuffled into oblivion, like hands of cards soon after they are dealt. But the cards themselves survive the shuffling. The cards are the genes. The genes are not destroyed by crossing-over, they merely change partners and march on. Of course they march on. That is their business. They are the replicators and we are their survival machines. When we have served our purpose we are cast aside. But genes are denizens of geological time: genes are forever.
→ -
Five per cent vision is better than no vision at all. Five per cent hearing is better than no hearing at all. Five per cent flight efficiency is better than no flight at all. It is thoroughly believable that every organ or apparatus that we actually see is the product of a smooth trajectory through animal space, a trajectory in which every intermediate stage assisted survival and reproduction.
→ -
You are born into a dangerous world, there are all sorts of ways in which you could die, and you need to believe your parents when they tell you don't go near the edge of the cliff, or don't pick up that snake, etc. There could very well be a Darwinian survival value in that sort of brain rule of thumb. And a by-product of that could be that you believe your parents when they tell you about the juju in the sky, or whatever it might be.
→ -
The body is a survival machine programmed to propagate the genes that reside inside it.
→ -
All life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities.
→
Related Authors
-
William Lane Craig Philosopher -
Stephen Jay Gould Paleontologist -
Lalla Ward Actress -
PZ Myers Scientist -
Bill Nye Educator -
Charles Darwin Naturalist -
Bill Maher Comedian -
Jerry A. Coyne Professor -
Sam Harris Author -
Noam Chomsky Linguist -
John Lennox Mathematician -
Stephen Hawking Physicist -
Bertrand Russell Philosopher -
Christopher Hitchens Author -
Daniel Dennett Philosopher -
Neil deGrasse Tyson Astrophysicist -
Carl Sagan Astronomer -
Douglas Adams Writer -
Steven Pinker Psychologist -
Lawrence M. Krauss Physicist