Richard Dawkins Quotes

In the animal world, on the other hand, the process of evolution is characterised by the progressive discrimination of the animal and vegetative functions, and a consequent differentiation of these two great provinces into their separate departments.

Evolution is a tinkerer.

Agricultural practice served Darwin as the material basis for the elaboration of his theory of Evolution, which explained the natural causation of the adaptation we see in the structure of the organic world. That was a great advance in the knowledge of living nature.

Natural selection is not evolution.

Animals can adapt to problems and make inventions, but often no faster than natural selection can do its work - the world acts as its own simulator in the case of natural selection.

As Darwin himself was at pains to point out, natural selection is all about differential survival within species, not between them.

The fuel for evolution is diversity, with natural selection leading to continuous adaptations and improvements in Nature's handiwork.

My whole interest is, how do you use evolution as an innovation engine? How does evolution solve new problems that life faces? And to have a system that can create a whole new chemical bond that biology hasn't done before, to me, demonstrates the power of nature to innovate.

Our physiological constitution is obviously a product of Darwinian processes, insofar as you buy the evolutional theory as a generative, as an account of the mechanism that generated us. Our physiology evolved, our behaviors evolved, and our accounts of those behaviors, both successful and unsuccessful, evolved.

Evolution is the fundamental idea in all of life science - in all of biology.

Evolution acts slowly. Our psychological characteristics today are those that promoted reproductive success in the ancestral environmen.

Natural selection certainly operates. It explains how bacteria will gain antibiotic resistance; it will explain how insects get insecticide resistance, but it doesn't explain how you get bacteria or insects in the first place.

For me, the level at which natural selection causes the phenomenon of adaptation is the level of the replicator - the gene.

Evolution is not a force but a process. Not a cause but a law.

Evolution - evolutionary change - does not happen quickly.

There are no shortcuts in evolution.

Evolution is fascinating to watch. To me it is the most interesting when one can observe the evolution of a single man.

It is difficult to imagine evolution in alien planets operating in any manner other than Darwinian.

Evolution is a process of constant branching and expansion.

I remember my first lecture on my first day in evolutionary biology, how populations and species change. I sat thinking, 'Why doesn't everyone know this?' I look back on it almost in horror: I came so close to not knowing how exciting our world is.

Biologically the species is the accumulation of the experiments of all its successful individuals since the beginning.

Natural selection is a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability

Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.

I know there is a difference between adaption and evolution.

Evolution is all about looking forward.