It is immoral to brand children with religion. ‘This is a Catholic child.’ ‘That is a Muslim child.’ I want everyone to flinch when they hear such a phrase, just as they would if they heard, ‘That is a Marxist child.’
For me, the level at which natural selection causes the phenomenon of adaptation is the level of the replicator – the gene.
It’s an important point to realize that the genetic programming of our lives is not fully deterministic. It is statistical – it is in any animal merely statistical – not deterministic.
Religion teaches you to be satisfied with nonanswers. It’s a sort of crime against childhood.
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.
A universe with a creator would be a totally different kind of universe, scientifically speaking, than one without.
Religious fanatics want people to switch off their own minds, ignore the evidence, and blindly follow a holy book based upon private ‘revelation’.
I’ve always been very suspicious of the left-right dimension in politics.
In Britain, Christianity is dying. Islam, unfortunately, isn’t.
Nico Tinbergen was my doctoral supervisor, and he was a benign, avuncular sort of influence; everybody loved him.
There are many very educated people who are religious, but they’re not creationists.
Scientists disagree among themselves but they never fight over their disagreements. They argue about evidence or go out and seek new evidence. Much the same is true of philosophers, historians and literary critics.
The solution often turns out more beautiful than the puzzle.
Teachers who help to open young minds perform a duty which is as near sacred as I will admit.
I don’t feel depressed. I feel elated.
I am baffled by the way sophisticated theologians who know Adam and Eve never existed still keep talking about it.
The world is well supplied with spiders whose male ancestors died after mating. The world is bereft of spiders whose would-be ancestors never mated in the first place.
If you read Islamic creationist literature, it’s pretty much lifted from American evangelical literature.
We’ve all been brought up with the view that religion has some kind of special privileged status. You’re not allowed to criticise it.
There’s branches of science which I don’t understand; for example, physics. It could be said, I suppose, that I have faith that physicists understand it better than I do.
I didn’t have a very starry school career, I was medium to above average, nothing special.
If there are other worlds elsewhere in the universe, I would conjecture they are governed by the same laws of natural selection.
I’m pretty sure there is some genetic component towards intelligence.
You can’t even begin to understand biology, you can’t understand life, unless you understand what it’s all there for, how it arose – and that means evolution.
The child has no way of knowing what’s good information.
I am one of those scientists who feels that it is no longer enough just to get on and do science. We have to devote a significant proportion of our time and resources to defending it from deliberate attack from organised ignorance.
I’m not much given to straight, irony-free hero-worship.
My interest in biology was pretty much always on the philosophical side.
Einstein was adamant in rejecting all ideas of a personal god.
How any government could promote the Vardy academies in the North-East of England is absolutely beyond me. Tony Blair defends them on grounds of diversity, but it should be unthinkable in the 21st century to have a school whose head of science believes the world is less than 10,000 years old.
By all means let’s be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
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.
I can remember at the age of about six being fascinated by the planets and learning all about Mars and Venus and things.
There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can’t prove that there aren’t any, so shouldn’t we be agnostic with respect to fairies?
There’s a mystical strain in every country, and eclipses are likely to bring that out.
If you set out in a spaceship to find the one planet in the galaxy that has life, the odds against your finding it would be so great that the task would be indistinguishable, in practice, from impossible.
Don’t feel embarrassed if you’ve never heard of William Lane Craig. He parades himself as a philosopher, but none of the professors of philosophy whom I consulted had heard his name, either.
There’s clearly a lot of Ludditism, and you see it in all the hysteria about every scientific story.
The very large brain that humans have, plus the things that go along with it – language, art, science – seemed to have evolved only once. The eye, by contrast, independently evolved 40 times. So, if you were to ‘replay’ evolution, the eye would almost certainly appear again, whereas the big brain probably wouldn’t.
I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.
Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs.
I think the world’s always a better place if people are filled with understanding.
Even if you believe a creator god invented the laws of physics, would you so insult him as to suggest that he might capriciously and arbitrarily violate them in order to walk on water, or turn water into wine as a cheap party trick at a wedding?
A triumph of consciousness-raising has been the homosexual hijacking of the word ‘gay.’
Segregation has no place in the education system.
I’m quite a softy, yes. I have a blank spot with respect to visual art, but I have perhaps a compensating hypersensitivity to poetry and music.
Nothing is wrong with peace and love. It is all the more regrettable that so many of Christ’s followers seem to disagree.
If you look up at the Milky Way through the eyes of Carl Sagan, you get a feeling in your chest of something greater than yourself. And it is. But it’s not supernatural.
A good theory explains a lot but postulates little.
The state of Israel seems to owe its very existence to the American Jewish vote, while at the same time consigning the non-religious to political oblivion.
Rather than say he’s an atheist, a friend of mine says, ‘I’m a tooth fairy agnostic,’ meaning he can’t disprove God but thinks God is about as likely as the tooth fairy.
I want very much to communicate science to as wide an audience as possible, but not at a cost of dumbing down, and not at a cost in getting things right.
From a Darwinian perspective, it is clear what pain is doing. It’s a warning: ‘Don’t do that again.’ If you burn yourself, you’re never going to pick up a live coal again.
Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun.
The question of whether there exists a supernatural creator, a God, is one of the most important that we have to answer. I think that it is a scientific question. My answer is no.
The history of science has been one long series of violent brainstorms, as successive generations have come to terms with increasing levels of queerness in the universe.
If there is a God, it’s going to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed.
Genome sequencing has changed taxonomy.
When brains get sufficiently big, presumably, as human brains have, consciousness seems to emerge.
It’s a difficult business, finding out what’s true about the world, the universe.
All the great religions have a place for awe, for ecstatic transport at the wonder and beauty of creation.
Bereavement is terrible, of course. And when somebody you love dies, it’s a time for reflection, a time for memory, a time for regret.
It has become almost a cliche 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.
My thoughts, my beliefs, my feelings are all in my brain. My brain is going to rot.
I’m not a good observer. I’m not proud of it.
To an honest judge, the alleged marriage between religion and science is a shallow, empty, spin-doctored sham.
Religious organisations have an automatic tax-free charitable status.
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.
I’m a cultural Christian in the same way many of my friends call themselves cultural Jews or cultural Muslims.
