Richard Dawkins Quotes

Evolution isn't just a take-it-or-leave-it story about where we came from. It's an epic at the centre of life itself. It tells us we are part of nature in every respect.

We share deep admiration for evolution, a force of Nature that has led to the finest chemistry of all time, and to all living things on this planet.

Human beings have long wondered whether they are alone in the universe.

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

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

Darwinism is not merely a support for naturalistic philosophy: it is a product of naturalistic philosophy.

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.

If you take a more Darwinian point of view the dynamics of the universe are such that as the universe evolved in time, complex systems arose out of the natural dynamics of the universe.

Evolution is among the most well-established theories in the scientific community. To doubt it sounds to biologists as absurd as denying relativity does to physicists.

The human's place in the universe will be set in the scheme of evolution, the product of our biological inheritance.

Life is a process of evolution.

Because of my medical and ideological training, I am accustomed to saying that life is adaptation and symbiosis.

I believe alien life is quite common in the universe, although intelligent life is less so. Some say it has yet to appear on planet Earth.

The universe is large and old, and the ingredients for life as we know it are everywhere, so there's no reason to think that Earth would be unique in that regard. Whether of not the life became intelligent is a different question, and we'll see if we find that.

You can't even begin to understand biology, you can't understand life, unless you understand what it's all there for, how it arose - and that means evolution.

The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us.

It took less than an hour to make the atoms, a few hundred million years to make the stars and planets, but five billion years to make man!

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

We should not live by Darwinian principles. But Darwin explains how we got here.

Charles Darwin got his theory, his notion of natural selection, evolution, and so did its independent discoverer, Alfred Wallace, from reading Malthus.

It seems to me that evolution adds greatly to the wonder of life because it takes it out of the realm of the arbitrary, the exceptional, and links it to the sequence of natural causation.

The theory of evolution, like the theory of gravity, is a scientific fact.

The building blocks of life are readily available throughout the universe.

That is a big question we all have: are we alone in the universe? And exoplanets confirm the suspicion that planets are not rare.

This survival of the fittest which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. Darwin has called "natural selection", or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.