Richard Dawkins Quotes
It is almost as if the human brain were specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism, and to find it hard to believe
Dawkins, Richard. The Blind Watchmaker. W. W. Norton & Company, 1986, p. 316.
She argues that our species is evolving and will continue to evolve, and that what any one family does for their child or children will not bend the evolutionary arc for the human race. However, many people are no much concerned the the race as a whole compared to their own family. See quote 583692 for a sharp quotation making this alternative point of view.
The Anglican Church of England like many others were originally threatened by the possibility of evolution. Darwin, himself a very religious man was castigated at the time. In modern days the mass of scientific evidence of evolution is overwhelming and most major religions have also learned that there is nothing inconsistent or threatening in this basic science. There are however some religious fundamentalists (mostly Christian and Muslim) who still reject this basic scientific notion, but this quotation represents most of the modern religious thinking.
Essentially, he was expressing a Darwinian idea in poetry. See Herbert Spencer {627582} for an even more specific argument for the same point.
This was not only the case in 1852, but also true 150 years later. The only difference is that there is much more proof of Evolution, and there is a much smaller proportion of the population that questions Evolution as the fundamental mechanism by which all species have developed.
Actually no school teaches that. What they did teach when covering Evolution was that some modern apes (chimpanzees and bonobos) and humans were both descended from a common ancestor. The Congressman was at that point an evangelical Christian fundamentalist, Later, DeLay was convicted and sentenced to jail for money laundering and illegally spending and raising campaign funds. He was also reprimanded by the House Ethics Committee for unethical methods of fund raising for other earlier actions.
This is a very good quotation showing the point of view of religious fundamentalists that if there is no fixed statement of ethics and morality as with the word of God as revealed in the Bible, what then makes anything right or wrong and the world exists in a moral behavioral vacuum. Other religionists hold that the morality is in the metaphors and philosophy of religion and not in the literal words of scripture. Still others argue that morality and religion itself is dynamic and is constantly changing. Then there are those who build their view of morality on philosophy but which is not based on a deity—Ethical Culturalists for example {592791}. Also, there are the pragmatic evolutionists who argue that cooperative behavior has evolved in man and cultural rules—morality—is also transmitted by culture and systems of law.
Richard Dawkins FRS FRSL is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist, and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was the University of Oxford's Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008. An atheist, he is well known for his criticism of creationism and intelligent design.
