Richard Dawkins Quotes

The evolution of sex is the hardest problem in evolutionary biology.

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

Animals have genes for altruism, and those genes have been selected in the evolution of many creatures because of the advantage they confer for the continuing survival of the species.

Evolution does not necessarily favor the longest-lived. It doesn't necessarily favor the biggest or the strongest or the fastest, and not even the smartest. Evolution favors those creatures best adapted to their environment. That is the sole test of survival and success.

Almost nothing is known from hybridization studies about the inheritance of courtship behavior of females, or of their responsiveness to particular male signals.

Why did humans lose their body hair? Why did they start walking on their hind legs? Why did they develop big brains? I think that the answer to all three questions is sexual selection.

We observe closely related species in sympatry and infer how they evolved from a common ancestor.

I did not claim that speciation occurs only in founder populations.

That the variability of an organism to a certain extent is a constant and certain condition of life we admit, otherwise there would be no distinguishable individuals of a species.

When a trait is universal, evolutionary biologists look for a genetic explanation and wonder how that gene or genes might enhance survival or reproductive success.

Evolutionary biologists are not content merely to explain how variation occurs within limits, however. They aspire to answer a much broader question-which is how complex organisms like birds, and flowers, and human beings came into existence in the first place.

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

Exchange of breeding individuals between two populations tends to homogenize their gene pools.

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.

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

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.

The general rule is that anything that is passed on in reproduction does not undergo senescence.

My theory of evolution is that Darwin was adopted.

From the sexual, or amatorial, generation of plants new varieties, or improvements, are frequently obtained; as many of the young plants from seeds are dissimilar to the parent, and some of them superior to the parent in the qualities we wish to possess... Sexual reproduction is the chef d'oeuvre, the master-piece of nature.

Evolution shows that in the long run, if the superior mixes with the inferior, the product is halfway between, and inferior to what you started with in the original superior group - in other words, mongrelized.

Our genomes are evolving and changing every single day.

I thought we'd just sequence the genome once and that would be sufficient for most things in people's lifetimes. Now we're seeing how changeable and adaptable it is, which is why we're surviving and evolving as a species.

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.

All organisms vary, and it's just folk knowledge. You just have to look around a room of people, and everybody knows that it's true. Darwin didn't know the mechanism of heredity, but you don't have to. You just need to know the fact of it.