Richard Dawkins Quotes

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

Natural selection is not evolution.

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

First, Darwinian theory tells us how a certain amount of diversity in life forms can develop once we have various types of complex living organisms already in existence.

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.

Just like mutations to DNA in biological organisms allow for evolution through natural selection, forking lets us run multiple experiments in parallel where the strongest versions survive.

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.

There are good reasons why natural selection has become widely accepted as an explanation of evolutionary development. When applied to mammals and other large animals, it fits perfectly. But we cannot assume that all evolutionary steps arise from selection, particularly when looking at smaller animals.

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.

With evolution, things are always changing, so I sort of think: Should we all be growing three heads?

Evolution thus is merely contingent on certain processes articulated by Darwin: variation and selection.

The idea that you would affect evolution is a very profound thing.

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.

God created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed - that is the meaning of evolution.

Natural selection eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn't create.

Evolution is all about passing on the genome to the next generation, adapting and surviving through generation after generation. From an evolutionary point of view, you and I are like the booster rockets designed to send the genetic payload into the next level of orbit and then drop off into the sea.

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

New gene pools are generated in every generation, and evolution takes place because the successful individuals produced by these gene pools give rise to the next generation.

Natural Selection never made it come to pass, as a habit of nature, that an unsupported stone should move downwards rather than upwards. It applies to no part of inorganic nature, and is very limited even in the phenomena of organic life.

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

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

Evolution never looks to the future.

When things get bad enough, then something happens to correct the course. And it's for that reason that I speak about evolution as an error-making and an error-correcting process. And if we can be ever so much better - ever so much slightly better - at error correcting than at error making, then we'll make it.

Mutation is random; natural selection is the very opposite of random.

There's nothing nonsensical about saying that what would evolve if Darwinian selection has its head is something that you don't want to happen. And I could easily imagine trying to go against Darwinism.