Richard Dawkins Quotes About Values

Quotes about: Values

• God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture.

  Richard Dawkins

  Religion, Survival, Culture

  Richard Dawkins (1989). “The Selfish Gene”, p.193, Oxford University Press, USA

• Scientific and technological progress themselves are value-neutral. They are just very good at doing what they do. If you want to do selfish, greedy, intolerant and violent things, scientific technology will provide you with by far the most efficient way of doing so. But if you want to do good, to solve the world's problems, to progress in the best value-laden sense, once again, there is no better means to those ends than the scientific way.

  Richard Dawkins

  Selfish, Mean, Science

  "The Evolutionary Future of Man". The Economist, Septermber 11, 1993.

• I am at a loss to reconcile the expensive and glossy production values of this book with the breathtaking inanity of the content.

  Richard Dawkins

  Book, Loss, Atheism

• That there is a continuous link from humans to gorillas, with the intermediate species merely long dead, is beyond the understanding of speciesists. Tie the label Homo sapiens even to a tiny piece of insensible embryonic tissue, and its life suddenly leaps to infinite, incomputable value.... Self-styled pro-lifers, and others that indulge in footling debates about exactly when in its development a foetus becomes human, exhibit the same discontinuous mentality. Human, to the discontinuous mind, is an absolutist concept. There can be no half measures. And from this flows much evil.

  Richard Dawkins

  Self, Indulge In, Ties

• I could easily believe that religion could enhance health and hence survival, and that therefore there could be indeed be literally Darwinian survival value, Darwinian selection in favor of religion. None of that of course bears at all upon the truth value of the claims made by religions.

  Richard Dawkins

  Believe, Survival, Favors

  "Faith and Reason" Interview, www.pbs.org.

• I mean, in a way, I feel that one of the reasons for learning about Darwinian evolution is as an object lesson in how not to set up our values and social lives.

  Richard Dawkins

  Mean, Lessons, Way

  "Religion and Atheism". "Q&A" with Tony Jones, www.abc.net.au. April 9, 2012.

• There is a whole field of inquiry that has come up in the last 30 or 40 years - some call it sociobiology or evolutionary psychology - relating to where we get our moral sense and why we value the idea of altruism, and locating both answers in behavioral adaptations for the preservation of our genes.

  Richard Dawkins

  Ideas, Years, Psychology

  Source: inters.org

• You are born into a dangerous world, there are all sorts of ways in which you could die, and you need to believe your parents when they tell you don't go near the edge of the cliff, or don't pick up that snake, etc. There could very well be a Darwinian survival value in that sort of brain rule of thumb. And a by-product of that could be that you believe your parents when they tell you about the juju in the sky, or whatever it might be.

  Richard Dawkins

  Believe, Sky, Snakes

  Source: www.macleans.ca

• There's a natural tendency for children to, in some sense, inherit the cultural values of their parents. I'm not against that, that's fine, that's wonderful. What I am against is labelling. Nobody ever labels a child a cricketer because his father is a cricketer, but they do label a child a Catholic because his parents are Catholic. I think it's more or less unique. Nobody ever labels a child a socialist or a conservative or a liberal because that's what their parents are.

  Richard Dawkins

  Children, Father, Unique

  "Richard Dawkins at the Sydney Writers' Festival". "Science Show" with Robyn Williams, www.abc.net.au. September 8, 2007.

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