Richard Dawkins Quotes

In the animal world, there are all kinds of behaviors that are binary: for example, to flee or to fight. In any evolutionary environment, knowing your opponent's decision would not be advantageous for long because your opponent would evolve the same recognition mechanism to also know you.

Evolutionary psychologists seem to want to unmask our noblest motives as ultimately self-interested - to show that our love for children, compassion for the unfortunate and sense of justice are just tactics in a Darwinian struggle to perpetuate our genes.

We're basically this very young species, only 200,000 years old. We're one of the newcomers, and we're going through the same process that other species go through, which is, how do I keep myself alive while taking care of the place that's going to keep my offspring alive?

If I were a worm, I would rather be the long-lived mutant than the normal worm, that's for sure.

Mammals are sentient beings that want to live and are afraid to die. Evolution vouchsafed us all with an instinct to survive, reproduce and flourish.

We are all ruled in what we do by impulses; and these impulses are so organized that our actions in general serve for our self preservation and that of the race.

It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.

Self-preservation, nature's first great law, all the creatures, except man, doth awe.

Man's unique reward, however, is that while animals survive by adjusting themselves to their background, man survives by adjusting his background to himself.

The human brain is built to compare; it's Darwinian to consider an alternative when one presents itself.

In courtship, who wins and who loses will determine who passes on their DNA to tomorrow.

Self-defence is Nature's eldest law.

Fighting hard to protect yourself and your relatives is good for your genes, but when captured and escape is not possible, giving up short of dying and making the best you can of the new situation is also good for your genes.

All species capable of grasping this fact manage better in the struggle for existence than those which rely upon their own strength alone: the wolf, which hunts in a pack, has a greater chance of survival than the lion, which hunts alone.

Just like an animal, when you want to survive, you don't think anymore.

Action leads to Attention. that in the short-term releases Rewarding brain chemicals and in the long term improves reproductive success.

When a lion doesn't get its prey, it remains hungry. When the prey saves himself, he has not won, but has saved his life.

So the animal finally performs in that situation only the fitting act.

Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous.

Those who want to live, let them fight, and those who do not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live.

Our retinas and brains have been wired by a hundred million years of evolution to find outlines in a visually complex landscape. This helps us to recognize prey and predators.

All, all is theft, all is unceasing and rigorous competition in nature; the desire to make off with the substance of others is the foremost - the most legitimate - passion nature has bred into us and, without doubt, the most agreeable one.

I have an odd theory on happiness, and it bothers people. My general theory is that happiness is a reward for an animal doing what it should be doing. So if a horse runs, it feels happy. Or if you are too thin, you can't be happy, because evolution wants you to be tense and anxious, trying to wake up in the morning looking for food.

In accord with Nature’s Laws, nothing is more right than the preservation of one’s own race.

As nature discovered early on, vision is one of the most powerful secret weapons of an intelligent animal to navigate, survive, interact, and change the complex world it lives in.