Pain – where, on the evolutionary view, does it come from? Pain, like everything else about life, we presume, is a Darwinian device, which functions to improve the sufferer’s survival ... Why the searing agony, an agony that can last for days, and from which the memory may never shake itself free? ... What’s wrong with the little red flag? I don’t have a decisive answer. ibid. pp 392-393
The difference between life and non-life is a matter of substance but of information. ibid. p405
Information on how to handle the present so as to survive into the future is necessarily gleaned from the past. Non-random survival of DNA in ancestral bodies is the obvious way in which information from the past is recorded for future use, and this is the route by which the primary database of DNA is built up. But there are three further ways in which information about the past is archived in such a way that it can be used to improve future chances of survival. There are the immune system, the nervous system, and culture. ibid. p406
All surviving life forms on this planet use the same machine code and we are all descended from a single ancestor. ibid. p410
Humans were aware of the cycles that govern our lives long before we understood them ... Gravity mediates other cycles that also matter to life ... It has even been suggested, again implausible in my opinion, that life without the moon would be impossible. What if our planet didn’t spin on its axis? ... What if Earth spun, but on an axis that was not tilted? ... The whole system, whether we are talking about life, or about water rising into the clouds and falling again, is finally dependent on the steady flow of energy from the sun ... Life evolves greater complexity only because natural selection drives it locally away from the statistically probable towards the improbable. ibid. p410-416
Oxygen flooded into the atmosphere as a pollutant, even a poison, until natural selection shaped living things to thrive on the stuff and, indeed, suffocate without it. ibid. p418
Self-replication spawns a population of entities, which compete with each other to be replicated. Since no copying process is perfect, the population will inevitably come to contain variety, and if variants exist in a population of replicators those that have what it takes to succeed will come to predominate. This is natural selection, and it could not start until the first self-replicating entity came into existence. ibid. p419
I think the RNA World theory plausible, and I think it quite likely that chemists will, within the next few decades, simulate in the laboratory a full reconstruction of the events that launched natural selection on its momentous way four billion years ago. ibid. p421
Individuals die; species, families, orders and even classes go extinct. But the evolution process itself seems to pick itself up and resume its recurrent flowering, with undiminished freshness, with unabated youthfulness, as epoch gives way to epoch. ibid. p422
In 1989 I wrote a paper called ‘The evolution of evolvability’ in which I suggested that not only do animals get better at surviving, as the generations go by: lineages of animals get better at evolving. ibid. p424
How is it that we find ourselves not merely existing but surrounded by such complexity, such elegance, such endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful? ibid. p426
It is no accident that we see green almost everywhere we look. It is no accident that we find ourselves perched on one tiny twig in the midst of a blossoming and flourishing tree of life; no accident that we are surrounded by millions of other species, eating, growing, rotting, swimming, walking, flying, burrowing, stalking, chasing, fleeing, outpacing, outwitting ... We are surrounded by endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful, and it is no accident, but the direct consequence of evolution by non-random natural selection – the only game in town, the greatest show on Earth. ibid. p426
Human farmers, horticulturalists, dog breeders etc. have shown us the immense power of the principle of Selection. Professor Richard Dawkins, lecture Adelaide Festival 2010
Evolution is the explanation for our existence … Even our ability to understand our own existence is a magnificent feat of evolution. Richard Dawkins, lecture New College of the Humanities 18 November 2013, ‘Why Evolution’
The species becomes populated by individuals who are good at doing it. ibid.
What really being carved by the chisels of natural selection is the gene pool. ibid.
So [George C] William’s message there is don’t assume that something is an adaptation just because it’s good for the animal. ibid.
Natural selection has to build upon what’s already there. ibid.
A bat is a superbly engineered night flying attack aircraft; it is the product of a long arms-race. ibid.
What Bill Hamilton did in 1964 was to realise that what matters is not just reproduction, not just producing children, but assisting the survival of your own genes. Professor Richard Dawkins, interview A Beautiful Mind
It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that). Richard Dawkins
I think that The Origin of Species is one of the greatest revolutions ever to hit the human mind. Before Darwin came along nobody really understood that it was possible to explain big complex beautiful elegant things in simple terms. People thought that in order to explain big things like life you had to have an even bigger explanation like God. What Darwin showed is that you can explain big complicated beautiful things in terms of simpler things, and that’s a real scientific explanation. Richard Dawkins, interview Horizon: The President’s Guide to Science, BBC 2008
Darwin made another really contribution which was to put forward the evidence for the fact of evolution much more cogently than anyone had before. But as you say the theory of natural selection was his greatest contribution ... How the fantastically complicated illusion of design that living creatures have could have been produced ... by an automatic undersigned unplanned process. Richard Dawkins, Radio Ulster 2008
Darwin’s Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection explains everything about Life – its complexity, its beauty, its elegance, its diversity. Richard Dawkins, interview Darwin’s Brave New World
He is one of the greatest scientists who has ever lived. He provided the explanation for my existence and yours. And the existence of every living creature. You can explain everything about life. Now that’s a powerful idea. ibid.
It’s my belief that DNA had to be a digital code of life or evolution would never have worked. Richard Dawkins
For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria. Richard Dawkins
The Book [The Selfish Gene] propelled him into the spotlight and gave Dawkins a platform to speak out as a ferocious critic of religion. Beautiful Minds: Professor Richard Dawkins, BBC 2010
The doctoral subject Tinbergen set for Richard was the study of innate behaviour in young animals. ibid.
He soon discovered a passion for campaigning. ibid.
Evolutionary thinking was moving fast. ibid.
Dawkins hit back against what he saw as the political hijacking of his work. ibid.
The Blind Watchmaker – which would set the stage for his role as a defender of science against the claims of Creationists. ibid.
Dawkins became a tireless promoter of evolution. ibid.
The battle for evolution is just a skirmish in a larger war. A larger war for rationality, for scepticism, for critical thinking, for a rational scientific view. Richard Dawkins, with Dan Dennett & Sam Harris & Ayaan Hirsi Ali, GAC Melbourne 2012
The Catholic Church has no problem with evolution. They do have a problem with the separation of humanity from all other species. And so the official view of the Catholic Church now is that we did indeed evolve, we are indeed cousins of apes and monkeys etc. but that at some point in our evolution God injected the soul, and did not inject the soul into any other species. Richard Dawkins, BBC Radio Ulster
This is one thing that physicists quite often say: the physical constants – that set of half a dozen or so numbers, constants, that physicists at present can’t explain – are very very finely tuned. Such that the end result of them is that evolution would eventually happen and we would eventually come into existence. Richard Dawkins, Minnesota Radio 2009
My eyes are constantly wide open to the extraordinary fact of existence. Not just human existence, but the existence of life and how this breathtakingly powerful process, which is natural selection, has managed to take the very simple facts of physics and chemistry and build them up to redwood trees and humans. Richard Dawkins