13 Richard Dawkins Quotes on Society

Richard Dawkins quotes on society

34. The likelihood is that, in 100,000 years time, we shall either have reverted to wild barbarism, or else civilisation will have advanced beyond all recognition - into colonies in outer space, for instance. In either case, evolutionary extrapolations from present conditions are likely to be highly misleading.

40. The second requirement of a virus-friendly environment - that it should obey a program of coded instructions - is again only quantitatively less true for brains than for cells or computers. We sometimes obey orders from one another, but also we sometimes don't. Nevertheless, it is a telling fact that, the world over, the vast majority of children follow the religion of their parents rather than any of the other available religions. Instructions to genuflect, to bow towards Mecca, to nod one's head rhythmically towards the wall, to shake like a maniac, to 'speak in tongues' - the list of such arbitrary and pointless motor patterns offered by religion alone is extensive - are obeyed, if not slavishly, at least with some reasonably high statistical probability.

63. 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.

74. Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.

76. Yousef Al-Khattab: When you take the women and dress them like whores, on the street... Richard Dawkins: I don't dress women, they dress themselves... Yousef Al-Khattab: But you allow it as a norm, to let the women go on the street dressed like this. What's going on with your society?

80. Without religion you have good people doing good things, and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion. (Quoting Steven Weinberg)

84. Natural selection builds child brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and tribal elders tell them. Such trusting obedience is valuable for survival: the analogue of steering by the moon for a moth. But the flip side of trusting obedience is slavish gullibility. The inevitable by-product is vulnerability to infection by mind viruses.

94. I suspect that today if you asked people to justify their belief in God, the dominant reason would be scientific. Most people, I believe, think that you need a God to explain the existence of the world, and especially the existence of life. They are wrong, but our education system is such that many people don't know it.

97. Out of all of the sects in the world, we notice an uncanny coincidence: the overwhelming majority just happen to choose the one that their parents belong to. Not the sect that has the best evidence in its favour, the best miracles, the best moral code, the best cathedral, the best stained glass, the best music: when it comes to choosing from the smorgasbord of available religions, their potential virtues seem to count for nothing, compared to the matter of heredity. This is an unmistakable fact; nobody could seriously deny it. Yet people with full knowledge of the arbitrary nature of this heredity, somehow manage to go on believing in their religion, often with such fanaticism that they are prepared to murder people who follow a different one.

101. We've reached a truly remarkable situation: a grotesque mismatch between the American intelligencia and the American electorate. A philosophical opinion about the nature of the universe which is held by the vast majority of top American scientists, and probably the majority of the intelligencia generally, is so abhorrent to the American electorate that no candidate for popular election dare affirm it in public. If I'm right, this means that high office in the greatest country in the world is barred to the very people best qualified to hold it: the intelligencia, unless they are prepared to lie about their beliefs. To put it bluntly American political opportunities are heavily loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest.

124. ... but the dominance hierarchy itself is not something that natural selection favors or disfavors. What natural selection favors or disfavors is the individual behavior of which the dominance hierarchy is a manifestation. I would put war and overpopulation in that category.

126. There's nothing nonsensical about saying that what would evolve if Darwinian selection has its head is something that you don't want to happen. And I could easily imagine trying to go against Darwinism.

137. ...what I am doing is going along with the fact that I live in a society where meat eating is accepted as the norm, and it requires a level of social courage which I haven't yet produced to break out of that. It's a little bit like the position which many people would have held a couple of hundred years ago over slavery. Where lots of people felt morally uneasy about slavery but went along with it because the whole economy of the South depended upon slavery.