192 quotes
There is no spirit-driven life force, no throbbing, heaving, pullulating, protoplasmic, mystic jelly. Life is just bytes and bytes and bytes of digital information.
River out of Eden (1995)
The fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved out of literally nothing, is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice.
On one point, though, I insist. This is that wherever in nature there is a sufficiently powerful illusion of good design for some purpose, natural selection is the only known mechanism that can account for it.
Climbing Mount Improbable (1996)
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 a chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do.
The Selfish Gene (1976)
And when we look closely, we find a system of morals which any civilised person today should surely find poisonous.
The Root of All Evil? (2006)
Haven't read Koran so couldn't quote chapter & verse like I can for Bible. But often say Islam greatest force for evil today
Islam needs a feminist revolution. It will be hard. What can we do to help?
It is very good that Wikipedia also gives a page to "Internet Meme". Internet memes are arguably the most important subset of memes today
Some states, e.g. "pregnant", are all-or-none, no intermediates. But sexual abuse has shades of grey, from violent buggery to mild touching.
We don't need fossils – the case for evolution is watertight without them; so it is paradoxical to use gaps in the fossil record as though they were evidence against evolution
The Greatest Show on Earth (2009)
The buzz words of the campus—diversity, inclusion, microaggression, power differential, white privilege, group safety—have become the buzz words in public life. Already confusing on campus, they become noxious off campus.
Your DNA may be destined to mingle with mine. Salutations!
River out of Eden (1995)
It may be that brain hardware has co-evolved with the internal virtual worlds that it creates. This can be called hardware-software co-evolution.
The Evolutionary Future of Man (1993)
I have just discovered that without her father's consent this sweet, trusting, gullible six-year-old is being sent, for weekly instruction, to a Roman Catholic nun. What chance has she?
Viruses of the Mind (1993)
You contain a trillion copies of a large, textual document written in a highly accurate, digital code, each copy as voluminous as a substantial book. I'm talking, of course, of the DNA in your cells.
The Richard Dimbleby Lecture: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder (1996)
It is an article of passionate faith among "politically correct" biologists and anthropologists that brain size has no connection with intelligence; that intelligence has nothing to do with genes; and that genes are probably nasty fascist things anyway.
The Evolutionary Future of Man (1993)
Evidence is the only good reason to believe anything
Each generation is a filter, a sieve; good genes tend to fall through the sieve into the next generation; bad genes tend to end up in bodies that die young or without reproducing.
River out of Eden (1995)
It has become almost a cliché to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics.
The Richard Dimbleby Lecture: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder (1996)
But it is we that choose to divide animals up into discontinuous species. On the evolutionary view of life there must have been intermediates, even though, conveniently for our naming rituals, they are usually extinct.
A Devil's Chaplain (2003)