Richard Dawkins Quotes About Selfish Gene
-
Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts which simply do not make evolutionary sense.
→ -
People who criticize The Selfish Gene like that often haven't read it. The selfish gene accounts for altruism toward kin and individuals who might be in a position to reciprocate your altruism.
→ -
Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.
→ -
A gene might be able to assist replicas of itself that are sitting in other bodies. If so, this would appear as individual altruism but it would be brought about by gene selfishness.
→ -
We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.
→ -
Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do.
→ -
Any altruistic system is inherently unstable, because it is open to abuse by selfish individuals, ready to exploit it.
→ -
We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.
→ -
When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.
→ -
Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence.
→ -
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
→ -
God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture.
→ -
Human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.
→ -
Mutation is random; natural selection is the very opposite of random.
→ -
If the universe were just electrons and selfish genes, meaningless tragedies ... are exactly what we should expect, along with equally meaningless good fortune. Such a universe would be neither evil nor good in intention ... The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.
→ -
Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.
→ -
I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one.
→ -
Leaders who forbid their followers to use effective contraceptive methods express a preference for "natural" methods of population limitation, and a natural method is exactly what they are going to get. It is called starvation.
→ -
They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.
→ -
I am not advocating a morality based on evolution.
→ -
The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.
→ -
Whenever conditions arise in which a new kind of replicator can make copies of itself, the new replicators will tend to take over, and start a new kind of evolution of their own. Once this new evolution begins, it will in no necessary sense be subservient to the old.
→ -
You can make some inferences about a man's character if you know something about the conditions in which he has survived and prospered.
→ -
Faith is powerful enough to immunize people against all appeals to pity, to forgiveness, to decent human feelings. It even immunizes them against fear, if they honestly believe that a martyr's death will send them straight to heaven.
→ -
What you cannot have is a gene that sacrifices itself for the benefit of other genes. What you can have is a gene that makes organisms sacrifice themselves for other organisms under the influence of selfish genes.
→ -
We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.
→ -
I've always been antagonistic to any naïve application of the selfish gene theory to politics. Some people have attempted to suggest that it means we are selfish or we should be selfish.
→ -
I am an enthusiastic Darwinian, but I think Darwinism is too big a theory to be confined to the narrow context of the gene.
→ -
We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism - something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.
→ -
The God of the Old testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction.
→
Related Authors
-
William Lane Craig Philosopher -
Stephen Jay Gould Paleontologist -
Lalla Ward Actress -
PZ Myers Scientist -
Bill Nye Educator -
Charles Darwin Naturalist -
Bill Maher Comedian -
Jerry A. Coyne Professor -
Sam Harris Author -
Noam Chomsky Linguist -
John Lennox Mathematician -
Stephen Hawking Physicist -
Bertrand Russell Philosopher -
Christopher Hitchens Author -
Daniel Dennett Philosopher -
Neil deGrasse Tyson Astrophysicist -
Carl Sagan Astronomer -
Douglas Adams Writer -
Steven Pinker Psychologist -
Lawrence M. Krauss Physicist