Top 12 Richard Dawkins Quotes
"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones..."
This is the latest in my quotes collection series. Check out the full collection here.
Richard Dawkins is one of the great intellectuals of our time. His main claim to fame is in refining and promoting the gene’s-eye view of evolution - also known as the selfish-gene theory - which holds that traits are selected to the extent that they propagate the genes giving rise to them. Dawkins is also the originator of the “meme” theory of cultural evolution and the concept of the extended phenotype, both of which are major contributions in their own right.
On top of all that, through his popular writing, Dawkins has probably introduced more people to the wonders of evolution than any other modern author - including his long-time rival Stephen Jay Gould.
Given the breadth and beauty of Dawkins’ work, trying to distill his ideas into just twelve quotes might seem like a fool’s errand - but I’ve given it a shot anyway. Hope you enjoy my selection!
On Life and Death
“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?”
“After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked - as I am surprisingly often - why I bother to get up in the mornings.”
On Evolution and Selfish Genes
“We are survival machines - robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes… A monkey is a machine that preserves genes up trees; a fish is a machine that preserves genes in the water.”
“[A]n elephant’s DNA and a virus are both ‘Copy Me’ programmes. The difference is that one of them has an almost fantastically large digression: ‘Copy me by building an elephant first’. But both kinds of programmes spread because, in their different ways, they are good at spreading.”
On Genetic Determinism
“The only point I wish to make is that, whatever view one takes on the question of determinism, the insertion of the word ‘genetic’ is not going to make any difference. If you are a full-blooded determinist you will believe that all your actions are predetermined by physical causes in the past, and you may or may not also believe that you therefore cannot be held responsible for your sexual infidelities. But, be that as it may, what difference can it possibly make whether some of those physical causes are genetic? Why are genetic determinants thought to be any more ineluctable, or blame-absolving, than ‘environmental’ ones?”
On the Extended Phenotype
“I find that my kind of paradigm examples are things like beaver dams and birds’ nests, where I’m trying to shake people into realising that you could have a ‘gene for’ a certain shape of birds’ nest, just as surely as you could have a certain shape of beak. You could selectively breed for nest shape.”
“Is it just an accident that we sneeze when getting a cold, or could it be a result of manipulation by viruses to increase their chances of infecting another host? Do any venereal diseases increase the libido, even if only by inducing an itch, like extract of Spanish fly? Do the behavioural symptoms of rabies infection increase the chance of the virus being passed on?”
On Memes
“Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.”
“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.”
On the Big Questions
“The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive; others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear; others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites; thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”
“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”
On Science
“Science is interesting, and if you don’t agree you can fuck off.”
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#10: “If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored.” Unfortunately I’ll never have a chance to sit down with him in a pub somewhere, to talk all night.
I felt good about Dawkins but surprisingly these quote make him seem quite trivial.
1) The first quote is a simple truism or tautology. The number of possible people is always greater than the number of actual people - infinity is greater than any number. Yay. In an infinite number of people there are an infinite number of poets greater than Keats. So? We won a lottery to be born? So?
2) We aren’t survival machines, we are entropy exporting machines along with a large number of other homeostatic systems. If individual annihilation would reduce the entropy of a system, the individual won’t survive.
3) Sneezing - were a parasite not programming its host to spread it, it would disappear quite quickly. Is that a strong surprise?
4) Lolcats is a Fad. A way of cooking that persists for 1000 is a culture. I find the ‘meme’ word unconvincing in his description. “Trope” is not an invented word and accurately describes everything claimed to be a “meme”. Relabeling old words isn’t that amazing.
I’m actually surprised - I need to rethink what I’ve read by and about him. It seems… superficiality draped in complexity.