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We Need A Name For The New Replicator, A Noun That Conveys The Idea Of A Unit Of Cultural Transmission, Or A Unit Of Imitation. 'mimeme' Comes From A Suitable Greek Root, But I Want A Monosyllable That Sounds A Bit Like 'gene'. I Hope My Classicist Friends Will Forgive Me If I Abbreviate Mimeme To Meme. If It Is Any Consolation, It Could Alternatively Be Thought Of As Being Related To 'memory', Or To The French Word Même. It Should Be Pronounced To Rhyme With 'cream'.

-Richard Dawkins

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We Need A Name

Richard Dawkins

...

We Need A Name For The New Replicator, A Noun That Conveys The Idea Of A Unit Of Cultural Transmission, Or A Unit Of Imitation. 'mimeme' Comes From A Suitable Greek Root, But I Want A Monosyllable That Sounds A Bit Like 'gene'. I Hope My Classicist Friends Will Forgive Me If I Abbreviate Mimeme To Meme. If It Is Any Consolation, It Could Alternatively Be Thought Of As Being Related To 'memory', Or To The French Word Même. It Should Be Pronounced To Rhyme With 'cream'.

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Most Of What We Strive For In Our Modern Life Uses The Apparatus Of Goal Seeking That Was Originally Set Up To Seek Goals In The State Of Nature.

Regarding The Accusations Of Sexual Abuse Of Children By Catholic Priests, Deplorable And Disgusting As Those Abuses Are, They Are Not So Harmful To The Children As The Grievous Mental Harm In Bringing Up The Child Catholic In The First Place.

We Have To Find Our Own Purposes In Life, Which Are Not Derived Directly From Our Scientific History.

Purpose Of Life

To Illustrate The Vain Conceit That The Universe Must Be Somehow Pre-ordained For Us, Because We Are So Well-suited To Live In It, He [douglas Adams] Mimed A Wonderfully Funny Imitation Of A Puddle Of Water, Fitting Itself Snugly Into A Depression In The Ground, The Depression Uncannily Being Exactly The Same Shape As The Puddle.

It's A Flaw In Our Argument, For Sure. By Any Reading Of Evolutionary Theory, Creationists Ought To Have Died Out Ages Ago. They Serve No Function In The Planet's Ecosystem, And No Other Species Has Survived So Long While In Such Fundamental Disagreement With Observable Reality. If I Wasn't Such An Ardent Believer In Secular Materialism, I'd Wager This Is Really Troubling Darwin In The Afterlife.

If It Suits [god] To Be A Deity That We Must Seek Without Being Forced To, Would It Not Have Been Sensible For Him To Use The Mechanism Of Evolution Without Posting Obvious Road Signs To Reveal His Role In Creation?

Two Religions Cannot Both Be Right, Because They Contradict Each Other, Yet They Can Both Be Wrong.

I Can't Be Sure God Does Not Exist. On A Scale Of Seven, Where One Means I Know He Exists, And Seven I Know He Doesn't, I Call Myself A Six. That Doesn't Mean I'm Absolutely Confident, That I Absolutely Know, Because I Don't.

What I Can't Understand Is Why You Invoke Improbability And Yet You Will Not Admit That You're Shooting Yourself In The Foot By Postulating Something Just As Improbable, Magicking Into Existence The Word God.

Jesus Was Not Content To Derive His Ethics From The Scriptures Of His Upbringing. He Explicitly Departed From Them. [...] Since A Principal Thesis Of This Chapter Is That We Do Not, And Should Not, Derive Our Morals From Scripture, Jesus Has To Be Honoured As A Model For That Very Thesis.

Everybody Is An Atheist In Saying That There Is A God - From Ra To Shiva - In Which He Does Not Believe. All That The Serious And Objective Atheist Does Is To Take The Next Step And To Say That There Is Just One More God To Disbelieve In.

Luke [the Gospel Writer] Screws Up His Dating By Tactlessly Mentioning Events That Historians Are Capable Of Independently Checking. There Was Indeed A Census Under Governor Quirinius - A Local Census, Not One Decreed By Caesar Augustus For The Empire As A Whole - But It Happened Too Late In 6 Ad, Long After Herod's Death.

In The Beginning Was Simplicity.

I Sympathize With Politicians Who Have To Watch Every Syllable They Utter For Fear It Will Be Misused By Somebody With An Agenda.

We Accept That People Are Irrational For Good Darwinian Reasons. But I Don't Think We Should Be So Pessimistic As To Think That Therefore We're Forever Condemned To Be Irrational.

No Matter How Much Knowledge And Wisdom You Acquire During Your Life, Not One Jot Will Be Passed On To Your Children By Genetic Means. Each New Generation Starts From Scratch.

The Machine Code Of The Genes Is Uncannily Computer-like. Apart From Differences In Jargon, The Pages Of A Molecular Biology Journal Might Be Interchanged With Those Of A Computer Engineering Journal.

Molecular Biology

The Messages That Dna Molecules Contain Are All But Eternal When Seen Against The Time Scale Of Individual Lifetimes. The Lifetimes Of Dna Messages Give Or Take A Few Mutations Are Measured In Units Ranging From Millions Of Years To Hundreds Of Millions Of Years; Or, In Other Words, Ranging From 10,000 Individual Lifetimes To A Trillion Individual Lifetimes. Each Individual Organism Should Be Seen As A Temporary Vehicle, In Which Dna Messages Spend A Tiny Fraction Of Their Geological Lifetimes.

The Idea Of A Divine Creator Belittles The Elegant Reality Of The Universe.

All The World’s Muslims Have Fewer Nobel Prizes Than Trinity College, Cambridge. They Did Great Things In The Middle Ages, Though.

They Are Either People Of Faith Who Have Lost Their Faith From Reading My Books, Or They Are People Who Had Already Lost Their Faith, And Something About My Books Encouraged Them To Affirm That.

The Hypothesis Of God Offers No Worthwhile Explanation For Anything, For It Simply Postulates What We Are Trying To Explain.

I Personally Would Go Further And Say That, If Your Morality Is Based, As Mine Is, On A Desire To Increase The Sum Of Happiness And Reduce Suffering, The Decision To Deliberately Give Birth To A Down Baby, When You Have The Choice To Abort It Early In The Pregnancy, Might Actually Be Immoral From The Point Of View Of The Child’s Own Welfare.

Saddam Hussein's Mind Would Have Been A Unique Resource For Historical, Political And Psychological Research: A Resource That Is Now Forever Unavailable To Scholars... In A Small Way His Execution Represents A Wanton And Vandalistic Destruction Of Important Research Data.

God's Existence Is Either True Or Not. But Calling It A Scientific Question Implies That The Tools Of Science Can Provide The Answer.

I Am Very Hostile To Religion Because It Is Enormously Dominant, Especially In American Life. And I Don't Buy The Argument That, Well, It's Harmless. I Think It Is Harmful, Partly Because I Care Passionately About What's True.

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The Body Is A Survival Machine Programmed To Propagate The Genes That Reside Inside It.

Science, As Opposed To Technology, Does Violence To Common Sense.

All Life Evolves By The Differential Survival Of Replicating Entities.

The Whole Of Technology Depends On A Scientific Background, And Of Course Technology Can Be Used For Evil Purposes. You Can't Blame Science For That.

It's Known That Stress Gives Rise To Disease. It's Also Known That Many Diseases, Especially Stress-related Diseases, Can Be Cured By Placebos - Pills That Have No Medicinal Effect, But People Think They Do, And So They Do.

I Don't Think God Is An Explanation At All. It's Simply Redescribing The Problem.

If Ever There Was A Slamming Of The Door In The Face Of Constructive Investigation, It Is The Word Miracle. To A Medieval Peasant, A Radio Would Have Seemed Like A Miracle.

[alternative Medicine Is Defined As] That Set Of Practices That Cannot Be Tested, Refuse To Be Tested Or Consistently Fail Tests.

Human Vanity Cherishes The Absurd Notion That Our Species Is The Final Goal Of Evolution.

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It Is An Essential Part Of The Scientific Enterprise To Admit Ignorance, Even To Exult In Ignorance As A Challenge To Future Conquests.

Even If It Were True That Evolution, Or The Teaching Of Evolution, Encouraged Immorality That Would Not Imply That The Theory Of Evolution Was False.

Theory Of Evolution

I Do Think Imagination Is Enormously Valuable, And That Children Should Be Encouraged In Their Imagination. That's Very True.

The Enlightenment Is Under Threat. So Is Reason. So Is Truth. So Is Science, Especially In The Schools Of America.

I Am Very Comfortable With The Idea That We Can Override Biology With Free Will.

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However Brief Our Time In The Sun, If We Waste A Second Of It, Or Complain That It Is Dull Or Barren Or (like A Child) Boring, Couldn't This Be Seen As A Callous Insult To Those Unborn Trillions Who Will Never Even Be Offered Life In The First Place?

Creationists And Holocaust Deniers Are Both Very Similar - Both Are Denying What Is A Perfectly Manifest Fact. In The Case Of Holocaust Deniers It's More Recent History, But In Both Cases The Evidence - In Favour Of The Holocaust And Evolution - Is Simply Overwhelming. That Doesn't Mean They Are Morally Or Politically Equivalent. But They Are Equivalent In Denying History.

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I Didn't Have A Very Starry School Career, I Was Medium To Above Average, Nothing Special.

There Are Very Interesting Controversies Within Evolution; However, Whether Evolution Occurs Is Not One Of Them. It Definitely Does.

[jay] Gould Sets Up An Artificial Wall Between The Two Worldviews That Doesn't Exist In My Life.

Scientific Beliefs Are Supported By Evidence, And They Get Results. Myths And Faiths Are Not And Do Not.

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.

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Some People Find Clarity Threatening. They Like Muddle, Confusion, Obscurity. So When Somebody Does No More Than Speak Clearly It Sounds Threatening.

My Personal Feeling Is That Understanding Evolution Led Me To Atheism.

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Changing Environment

The Fact That Somebody Does Good Doesn't Make Their Beliefs True.

Do You Really Mean The Only Reason You Try To Be Good Is To Gain God's Approval And Reward? That's Not Morality, That's Just Sucking Up.

I Think There Could Be A Very Large Number Who Are Creationists By Default. Those Are The People I Want To Reach.

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St. Augustine Wrote That Basically It Is Not Possible To Understand What Was Being Described In Genesis. It Was Not Intended As A Science Textbook. It Was Intended As A Description Of Who God Was, Who We Are And What Our Relationship Is Supposed To Be With God.

The Truly Adult View [...] Is That Our Life Is As Meaningful, As Full And As Wonderful As We Choose To Make It. And We Can Make It Very Wonderful Indeed.

Do Humans Have A Different Moral Significance Than Cows In General?

To Invoke The Origin Of The Dna/protein Machine By Invoking A Supernatural Designer Is To Explain Precisely Nothing - For It Leaves Unexplained The Origin Of The Designer.

In A Way, I Think Religion Is To Be Admired For Asking The Right Questions. I Just Think It's Got The Wrong Answers.

It Is Grindingly, Creakingly, Crashingly Obvious That If Darwinism Was Really A Theory Of Chance, It Could Not Work.

My Interest In Biology Was Pretty Much Always On The Philosophical Side.

Just Because Science So Far Has Failed To Explain Something, Such As Consciousness, To Say It Follows That The Facile, Pathetic Explanations Which Religion Has Produced Somehow By Default Must Win The Argument Is Really Quite Ridiculous.

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.

Peter Sutcliffe, The Yorkshire Ripper, Distinctly Heard The Voice Of Jesus Telling Him To Kill Women, And He Was Locked Up For Life. George W. Bush Says That God Told Him To Invade Iraq (a Pity God Didn't Vouchsafe Him A Revelation That There Were No Weapons Of Mass Destruction).

Mass Destruction

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.

There's An Element Of Paradox There - That At Least You Know Where You Stand With The Fundamentalists. I Mean, They're Absolutely Clear In Their Error And Their Stupidity, And So You Can Really Go After Them.

I Am Not Advocating A Morality Based On Evolution.

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.

Segregation Has No Place In The Education System.

Education System

I Don't Know What To Think About Magic And Fairy Tales.

Things Exist Either Because They Have Recently Come Into Existence Or Because They Have Qualities That Made Them Unlikely To Be Destroyed In The Past.

If You Want To Do Evil, Science Provides The Most Powerful Weapons To Do Evil; But Equally, If You Want To Do Good, Science Puts Into Your Hands The Most Powerful Tools To Do So

When I Sign Books, I Get Lines Of People And What They Usually Say Is: "thank You. You Have Changed My Life." I Am Really Moved By That.

There's Real Poetry In The Real World. Science Is The Poetry Of Reality.

Let Children Learn About Different Faiths, Let Them Notice Their Incompatibility, And Let Them Draw Their Own Conclusions About The Consequences Of That Incompatibility. As For Whether They Are ‘valid,’ Let Them Make Up Their Own Minds When They Are Old Enough To Do So.

You Could Give Aristotle A Tutorial. And You Could Thrill Him To The Core Of His Being. Aristotle Was An Encyclopedic Polymath, An All Time Intellect. Yet Not Only Can You Know More Than Him About The World, You Also Can Have A Deeper Understanding Of How Everything Works. Such Is The Privilege Of Living After Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick And Their Colleagues.

I've Been Reading An Alabama Newspaper That One Man Shot Another Man Because He Beat Him In A Bible-quoting Competition.

The Darwinian Theory Is In Principle Capable Of Explaining Life. No Other Theory That Has Ever Been Suggested Is In Principle Capable Of Explaining Life.

Evolution Could So Easily Be Disproved If Just A Single Fossil Turned Up In The Wrong Date Order. Evolution Has Passed This Test With Flying Colours.

To Describe Religions As Mind Viruses Is Sometimes Interpreted As Contemptuous Or Even Hostile. It Is Both. I Am Often Asked Why I Am So Hostile To Organized Religion.

It Is A Remarkable Coincidence That Almost Everyone Has The Same Religion As Their Parents And It Always Just So Happens They're The Right Religion.

The Less You Think, The More You Believe.

What's Wrong With Being Elitist If You Are Trying To Encourage People To Join The Elite Rather Than Being Exclusive?

I've Never Heard Of William Craig. A Debate With Him Might Look Good On His Resume, But It Wouldn't Look Good On Mine!

Evil…doesn’t Mean Doing Things That Have Bad Consequences For People. It Means Private Thoughts And Actions That Are Not To “the Christian Majority’s” Private Liking.

Discrimination Is Not Liberal. Arguing Against Discrimination Is Not Intolerance.

We Who Are Atheists Are Also A-fairyists, A-teapotists, And A-unicornists, But We Don't Have To Bother Saying So.

Religion Teaches You To Be Satisfied With Nonanswers. It’s A Sort Of Crime Against Childhood.

I Once Wrote That Anybody Who Believes The World Is Only 6,000 Years Old Is Either Ignorant, Stupid, Insane Or Wicked.

The Total Amount Of Suffering Per Year In The Natural World Is Beyond All Decent Contemplation. During The Minute That It Takes Me To Compose This Sentence, Thousands Of Animals Are Being Eaten Alive, Many Others Are Running For Their Lives, Whimpering With Fear, Others Are Slowly Being Devoured From Within By Rasping Parasites, Thousands Of All Species Are Dying Of Starvation, Thirst, And Disease. 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.

People Who Do Not Know The Bible Well Have Been Gulled Into Thinking It Is A Good Guide To Morality. This Mistaken View May Have Motivated The "millionaire Conservative Party Donors". I Have Even Heard The Cynically Misanthropic Opinion That, Without The Bible As A Moral Compass, People Would Have No Restraint Against Murder, Theft And Mayhem. The Surest Way To Disabuse Yourself Of This Pernicious Falsehood Is To Read The Bible Itself.

I Think Looking Back To My Own Childhood, The Fact That So Many Of The Stories I Read Allowed The Possibility Of Frogs Turning Into Princes, Whether That Has A Sort Of Insidious Affect On Rationality, I'm Not Sure. Perhaps It's Something For Research.

What Francis [collins] Was Just Saying About Genesis Was, Of Course, A Little Private Quarrel Between Him And His Fundamentalist Colleagues. It Would Be Unseemly For Me To Enter In Except To Suggest That He'd Save Himself An Awful Lot Of Trouble If He Just Simply Ceased To Give Them The Time Of Day.

We're Going To Die, And That Makes Us The Lucky Ones.

Intelligent Life On A Planet Comes Of Age When It First Works Out The Reason For Its Own Existence.

Natural Selection Is Anything But Random.

Natural Selection

People Really, Really Hate Their Religion Being Criticized. It's As Though You've Said They Had An Ugly Face; They Seem To Identify Personally With It.

Barring A Theoretical Resolution, Which I Think Is Unlikely, You Either Have To Say There Are Zillions Of Parallel Universes Out There That We Can't Observe At Present Or You Have To Say There Was A Plan. I Actually Find The Argument Of The Existence Of A God Who Did The Planning More Compelling Than The Bubbling Of All These Multiverses.

It Is Raining Dna Outside. On The Bank Of The Oxford Canal At The Bottom Of My Garden Is A Large Willow Tree, And It Is Pumping Downy Seeds Into The Air. ... Spreading Dna Whose Coded Characters Spell Out Specific Instructions For Building Willow Trees That Will Shed A New Generation Of Downy Seeds. ... It Is Raining Instructions Out There; It's Raining Programs; It's Raining Tree-growing, Fluff-spreading, Algorithms. That Is Not A Metaphor, It Is The Plain Truth. It Couldn't Be Any Plainer If It Were Raining Floppy Discs.

For Me, Moral Questions Such As Stem-cell Research Turn Upon Whether Suffering Is Caused. In This Case, Clearly None Is. The Embryos Have No Nervous System. But That's Not An Issue Discussed Publicly. The Issue Is, Are They Human? If You Are An Absolutist Moralist, You Say, "these Cells Are Human, And Therefore They Deserve Some Kind Of Special Moral Treatment."

Evolution Is Not A Genetically Controlled Distortion Of One Adult Form Into Another; It Is A Genetically Controlled Alteration In A Developmental Program.

Having A Debate With A Modern Christian Is Like Punching A Sponge.

I Do Think The Roman Catholic Religion Is A Disease Of The Mind Which Has A Particular Epidemiology Similar To That Of A Virus... Religion Is A Terrific Meme. That's Right. But That Doesn't Make It True And I Care About What's True. Smallpox Virus Is A Terrific Virus. It Does Its Job Magnificently Well. That Doesn't Mean That It's A Good Thing. It Doesn't Mean That I Don't Want To See It Stamped Out.

... You Need More Than Luck To Navigate Successfully Through A Thousand Sieves In Succession.

After Sleeping Through A Hundred Million Centuries, We Have Finally Opened Our Eyes On A Sumptuous Planet, Sparkling With Color, Bountiful With Life.

Professor Challenger, Conan Doyle's Science Hero, Was A Sort Of Irascible Man Constantly Bellowing At People, So He Was A Little Bit Of A Departure From Both Of Those Stereotypes.

Faith Is Belief Without Evidence And Reason; Coincidentally That's Also The Definition Of Delusion.

Are Science And Religion Converging? No. There Are Modern Scientists Whose Words Sound Religious But Whose Beliefs, On Close Examination, Turn Out To Be Identical To Those Of Other Scientists Who Straightforwardly Call Themselves Atheists.

I Do Like Philip Pullman.and That's An Exception Because Philip Pullman's Books Allow Magic.

If You Divide Christians Into Denominations, Agnostics And Atheists Come In Third, Behind Catholics And Baptists. That's Interesting When You Contrast It With The Lack Of Influence Of Nonbelievers.

The Fact That Life Evolved Out Of Nearly Nothing, Some 10 Billion Years After The Universe Evolved Out Of Literally Nothing, Is A Fact So Staggering That I Would Be Mad To Attempt Words To Do It Justice.

People Who Believe The Earth Was Created 6000 Years Ago, When It's Actually 4.5 Billion Years Old, Should Also Believe The Width Of North America Is 8 Yards. That Is The Scale Of The Error.

False Beliefs Can Be Every Bit As Consoling As True Ones, Right Up Until The Moment Of Disillusionment.

I Love Romantic Poetry.

Romantic Poetry

[invading Iraq] Will Unite The Entire Arab World Against The West.

It Is All Too Easy To Mistake Passion That Can Change Its Mind For Fundamentalism, Which Never Will.

The Roman Catholic Church Is An Institution For Whose Gains The Phrase "ill-gotten" Might Have Been Specially Invented. And Of All Its Money-making Rip-offs, The Selling Of Indulgences Must Surely Rank Among The Greatest Con Tricks In History, The Medieval Equivalent Of The Nigerian Internet Scam But Far More Successful.

I Think What Attracts Me About The Electric Monk Is That It's Such An Eloquent Example Of The Futility Of Belief For Belief's Sake. I Mean There's Only Any Point In Believing Something If It's True.

Faith Is The Great Cop-out, The Great Excuse To Evade The Need To Think.

I Am At A Loss To Reconcile The Expensive And Glossy Production Values Of This Book With The Breathtaking Inanity Of The Content.

The Human Psyche Has Two Great Sicknesses: The Urge To Carry Vendetta Across Generations, And The Tendency To Fasten Group Labels On People Rather Than See Them As Individuals. Abrahamic Religion Gives Strong Sanction To Both-and Mixes Explosively With Both. Only The Willfully Blind Could Fail To Implicate The Divisive Force Of Religion In Most, If Not All, Of The Violent Enmities In The World Today.

I Think That [jay] Gould's Separate Compartments Was A Purely Political Ploy To Win Middle-of-the-road Religious People To The Science Camp. But It's A Very Empty Idea. There Are Plenty Of Places Where Religion Does Not Keep Off The Scientific Turf.

Religious Organisations Have An Automatic Tax-free Charitable Status.

Commonsense Lets Us Down, Because Commonsense Evolved In A World Where Nothing Moves Very Fast, And Nothing Is Very Small Or Very Large; The Mundane World Of The Familiar.

The Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus Has Shown Great Courage, In The Face Of Spiteful Vested Interests, In Demonstrating How Easy It Is For People To Concoct Memories That Are Entirely False But Which Seem, To The Victim, Every Bit As Real As True Memories.

We Are A Very, Very Unusual Species.

I Am Not An Enthusiast For Diversity Of Opinion Where Facts Are Concerned.

...there Are No Natural Borderlines In Evolution. The Illusion Of A Borderline Is Created By The Fact That The Evolutionary Intermediates Happen To Be Extinct.

In Our Prehistoric Past, We Would Have Lived In Extended Families, Surrounded By Kin Whose Interests We Might Have Wanted To Promote Because They Shared Our Genes. Now We Live In Big Cities. We Are Not Among Kin Nor People Who Will Ever Reciprocate Our Good Deeds. It Doesn't Matter. Just As People Engaged In Sex With Contraception Are Not Aware Of Being Motivated By A Drive To Have Babies, It Doesn't Cross Our Mind That The Reason For Do-gooding Is Based In The Fact That Our Primitive Ancestors Lived In Small Groups.

[r]eductionism' Is One Of Those Things, Like Sin, That Is Only Mentioned By People Who Are Against It. To Call Oneself A Reductionist Will Sound, In Some Circles, A Bit Like Admitting To Eating Babies. But, Just As Nobody Actually Eats Babies, So Nobody Is Really A Reductionist In Any Sense Worth Being Against.

I Find Many Of Answers In The Spiritual Realm. That In No Way Compromises My Ability To Think Rigorously As A Scientist.

Textbooks Describe Dna As A Blueprint For A Body. It's Better Seen As A Recipe For Making A Body, Because It Is Irreversible. But Today I Want To Present It As Something Different Again, And Even More Intriguing. The Dna In You Is A Coded Description Of Ancient Worlds In Which Your Ancestors Lived. Dna Is The Wisdom Out Of The Old Days, And I Mean Very Old Days Indeed.

Religion Is Nothing More Than A Useless And Sometimes Dangerous, Evolutionary Accident. Religious Behavior May Be A Misfiring, An Unfortunate Byproduct Of An Underlying Psychological Propensity Which In Other Circumstances Is, Or Once Was, Useful.

What Has 'theology' Ever Said That Is Of The Smallest Use To Anybody? When Has 'theology' Ever Said Anything That Is Demonstrably True And Is Not Obvious? What Makes You Think That 'theology' Is A Subject At All?

You Can't Blame Science For Being Used For Evil Purposes. What You Can Do Is Say, 'this Is An Exceedingly Powerful Tool.' And You Want To Make Sure It Is Used For Good Purposes, Not Bad Ones. That Is A Political Decision.

The Only Watchmaker Is The Blind Forces Of Physics.

Isn't It A Remarkable Coincidence Almost Everyone Has The Same Religion As Their Parents ? And It Always Just Happens To Be The Right Religion. Religions Run In Families. If We'd Been Brought Up In Ancient Greece We Would All Be Worshiping Zeus And Apollo. If We Had Been Born Vikings We Would Be Worshiping Wotan And Thor. How Does This Come About ? Through Childhood Indoctrination.

Maybe Somewhere In Some Other Galaxy There Is A Super-intelligence So Colossal That From Our Point Of View It Would Be A God. But It Cannot Have Been The Sort Of God That We Need To Explain The Origin Of The Universe, Because It Cannot Have Been There That Early.

I Am Not Absolutely Positive There Is No God. Only In The Sense That I'm Not Absolutely Positive There Is No Large China Teapot In Orbit In The Solar System.

When We Started Out And We Were Talking About The Origins Of The Universe And The Physical Constants, I Provided What I Thought Were Cogent Arguments Against A Supernatural Intelligent Designer. But It Does Seem To Me To Be A Worthy Idea.

Religion Is A Powerful Weapon That Can Be Used Because It Persuades People To Do Things. And Thus It Can Be Used For Good Or Ill. But It Should Not Be A Powerful Weapon At All.

My Thoughts, My Beliefs, My Feelings Are All In My Brain. My Brain Is Going To Rot.

Indeed, Organizing Atheists Has Been Compared To Herding Cats, Because They Tend To Think Independently And Will Not Conform To Authority.

Show Me A Cultural Relativist At 30,000 Feet And I'll Show You A Hypocrite ... If You Are Flying To An International Congress Of Anthropologists Or Literary Critics, The Reason You Will Probably Get There - The Reason You Don't Plummet Into A Ploughed Field - Is That A Lot Of Western Scientifically Trained Engineers Have Got Their Sum Right.

Thus The Creationist's Favourite Question "what Is The Use Of Half An Eye?" Actually, This Is A Lightweight Question, A Doddle To Answer. Half An Eye Is Just 1 Per Cent Better Than 49 Per Cent Of An Eye.

...i Am Not Attacking Any Particular God Or Gods. I Am Attacking God, All Gods, Anything And Everything Supernatural, Whenever Or Wherever They Have Been Or Will Be Invented.

Anything And Everything

Words Are Our Servants, Not Our Masters. For Different Purposes, We Find It Convenient To Use Words In Different Senses.

I Think That The Bible As Literature Should Be A Compulsory Part Of The National Curriculum.. You Can't Understand English Literature And Culture Without It. But Insofar As Theology Studies The Nature Of The Divine, It Will Earn The Right To Be Taken Seriously When It Provides The Slightest, Smallest Smidgen Of A Reason For Believing In The Existence Of The Divine. Meanwhile, We Should Devote As Much Time To Studying Serious Theology As We Devote To Studying Serious Fairies And Serious Unicorns.

We Are All Atheists About Most Of The Gods That Societies Have Ever Believed In. Some Of Us Just Go One God Further.

If There Is A God

Charles Darwin Made Arguably The Greatest Discovery Any Human Has Ever Made. He Was A Man Of Great Persistence. He Wasn't Probably A Natural Genius, He Worked Very Hard - Even Though He Was An Invalid. He Was A Great Family Man, A Very Nice Man. I Think He Was Admirable In All Sorts Of Ways.

For Centuries The Most Powerful Argument For God's Existence From The Physical World Was The So-called Argument From Design: Living Things Are So Beautiful And Elegant And So Apparently Purposeful, They Could Only Have Been Made By An Intelligent Designer. But [charles] Darwin Provided A Simpler Explanation. His Way Is A Gradual, Incremental Improvement Starting From Very Simple Beginnings And Working Up Step By Tiny Incremental Step To More Complexity, More Elegance, More Adaptive Perfection.

I Don't Think God Is An Explanation At All. It's Simply Redescribing The Problem. We Are Trying To Understand How We Have Got A Complicated World, And We Have An Explanation In Terms Of A Slightly Simpler World, And We Explain That In Terms Of A Slightly Simpler World And It All Hangs Together Down To An Ultimately Simple World. Now, God Is Not An Explanation Of That Kind. God Himself Cannot Be Simple If He Has Power To Do All The Things He Is Supposed To Do.

Complicated World

If Complex Organisms Demand An Explanation, So Does A Complex Designer. And It's No Solution To Raise The Theologian's Plea That God (or The Intelligent Designer) Is Simply Immune To The Normal Demands Of Scientific Explanation. To Do So Would Be To Shoot Yourself In The Foot. You Cannot Have It Both Ways. Either Id Belongs In The Science Classroom, In Which Case It Must Submit To The Discipline Required Of A Scientific Hypothesis. Or It Does Not, In Which Case, Get It Out Of The Science Classroom And Send It Back To Church, Where It Belongs.

I Think Nobody Would Claim That Random Genetic Drift Is Capable Of Producing Adaptation, That Is To Say The Illusion Of Design. Random Genetic Drift Can't Produce Wings That Are Good At Flying, Or Eyes That Are Good At Seeing, Or Legs That Are Good At Running. But Random Genetic Drift Probably Is Very Important In Driving Evolution At The Molecular Genetic Level.

Good And Evil - I Don't Believe That There Is Hanging Out There, Anywhere, Something Called Good And Something Called Evil.

As Long As We Accept The Principle That Religious Faith Must Be Respected Simply Because It Is Religious Faith, It Is Hard To Withhold Respect From The Faith Of Osama Bin Laden And The Suicide Bombers

Our Own Existence Once Presented The Greatest Of All Mysteries, But ... It Is A Mystery No Longer Because It Is Solved. Darwin And Wallace Solved It ... I Was Surprised That So Many People Seemed Not Only Unaware Of The Elegant And Beautiful Solution To This Deepest Of Problems But, Incredibly, In Many Cases Actually Unaware That There Was A Problem In The First Place!

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.

I'm Sure Obama Is An Atheist, I'm Sure Kennedy Was An Atheist, But I Doubt If Pope Frank Is.

A God Capable Of Continuously Monitoring And Controlling The Individual Status Of Every Particle In The Universe Cannot Be Simple. His Existence Is Going To Need A Mammoth Explanation In Its Own Right.

Physicists Are Working On The Big Bang, And One Day They May Or May Not Solve It.

We Need A Name For The New Replicator, A Noun That Conveys The Idea Of A Unit Of Cultural Transmission, Or A Unit Of Imitation. 'mimeme' Comes From A Suitable Greek Root, But I Want A Monosyllable That Sounds A Bit Like 'gene'. I Hope My Classicist Friends Will Forgive Me If I Abbreviate Mimeme To Meme. If It Is Any Consolation, It Could Alternatively Be Thought Of As Being Related To 'memory', Or To The French Word Même. It Should Be Pronounced To Rhyme With 'cream'.

I Have A Strong Feeling That The Subject Of Evolution Is Beautiful Without The Excuse Of Creationists Needing To Be Bashed.

I'm A Cultural Christian In The Same Way Many Of My Friends Call Themselves Cultural Jews Or Cultural Muslims.

There Could Be Something Incredibly Grand And Incomprehensible And Beyond Our Present Understanding.

Cloning May Be Good And It May Be Bad. Probably It's A Bit Of Both. The Question Must Not Be Greeted With Reflex Hysteria But Decided Quietly, Soberly And On Its Own Merits. We Need Less Emotion And More Thought.

There Is A Popular Cliché ... Which Says That You Cannot Get Out Of Computers Any More Than You Have Put In..., That Computers Can Only Do Exactly What You Tell Them To, And That Therefore Computers Are Never Creative. This Cliché Is True Only In A Crashingly Trivial Sense, The Same Sense In Which Shakespeare Never Wrote Anything Except What His First Schoolteacher Taught Him To Write-words.

[richard Leakey Is] A Robust Hero Of A Man, Who Actually Lives Up To The Cliché, “a Big Man In Every Sense Of The Word.” Like Other Big Men He Is Loved By Many, Feared By Some, And Not Over-preoccupied With The Judgments Of Any.

I Think Douglas [adams] Is Writing With An Eye To Irony For Adults At The Same Time As Entertaining Children.

Evolution Is A Theory In A Special Philosophical Sense Of Science, But In Terms Of Ordinary Laymen's Use Of Language, It's A Fact, .. Evolution Is A Fact In The Same Sense That It's A Fact That The Earth Is Round And Not Flat, [that] The Earth Goes Round The Sun. Both Those Are Also Theories, But They're Theories That Have Never Been Disproved And Never Will Be Disproved.

My Love Of Truth And Honesty Forces Me To Notice That The Liberal Intelligentsia Of Western Countries Is Betraying Itself Where Islam Is Concerned.

Religions Do Make Claims About The Universe--the Same Kinds Of Claims That Scientists Make, Except They're Usually False.

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.

Humans Are Just A Very, Very Small Part Of The Panoply Of Life, And It Is Arguable That In A Certain Sense, Humans Have Emancipated Themselves From Darwinian Selection.

I Don't See That [richard] Dawkins' Basic Account Of Evolution Is Incompatible With God's Having Designed It.

A Formative Influence On My Undergraduate Self Was The Response Of A Respected Elder Statesmen Of The Oxford Zoology Department When An American Visitor Had Just Publicly Disproved His Favourite Theory. The Old Man Strode To The Front Of The Lecture Hall, Shook The American Warmly By The Hand And Declared In Ringing, Emotional Tones: "my Dear Fellow, I Wish To Thank You. I Have Been Wrong These Fifteen Years." And We Clapped Our Hands Red. Can You Imagine A Government Minister Being Cheered In The House Of Commons For A Similar Admission? "resign, Resign" Is A Much More Likely Response!

Do Not Indoctrinate Your Children. Teach Them How To Think For Themselves, How To Evaluate Evidence, And How To Disagree With You.

Let's Get Up Off Our Knees, Stop Cringing Before Bogeymen And Virtual Fathers, Face Reality, And Help Science To Do Something Constructive About Human Suffering.

I Am Utterly Fed Up With The Respect We Have Been Brainwashed Into Bestowing Upon Religion.

I've Seen [lalla Ward] Episodes Of "doctor Who." They're Good, At Least Partly Because The Scripts Were Written By Douglas Adams.

We Have The Same Genetic Code For All Living Creatures. We Have A Large Number Of Genes That Are Manifestly The Same, But With Detail Differences - They Look Like Different Drafts Of The Same Book. In Extreme Cases, Like A Human And A Beetroot, It's Like The Difference Between Matthew And Luke's Gospel - Clearly They Tell The Same Story, But With Different Words. Whereas With A Human And A Chimp, It's Like Two Different Printings Of Matthew, With A Few Typos In One.

If People Think God Is Interesting, The Onus Is On Them To Show That There Is Anything There To Talk About. Otherwise They Should Just Shut Up About It.

My God Is Not Improbable To Me. He Has No Need Of A Creation Story For Himself Or To Be Fine-tuned By Something Else.

Of Course, We Would Love To Know More About The Exact Moment Of Big Bang, But Interposing An Outside Intelligence Does Nothing To Add To That Knowledge, As We Still Know Nothing About The Creation Of That Intelligence.

As A Scientist, I Am Hostile To Fundamentalist Religion Because It Actively Debauches The Scientific Enterprise. It Teaches Us Not To Change Our Minds, And Not To Want To Know Exciting Things That Are Available To Be Known. It Subverts Science And Saps The Intellect.

Fundamentalist Religion

It's About Time We Start Criticizing Faith.

I Do Feel Visceral Revulsion At The Burka Because For Me It Is A Symbol Of The Oppression Of Women.

The Very Idea That We Get A Moral Compass From Religion Is Horrible. Not Only Should We Not Get Our Moral Compass From Religion, As A Matter Of Fact We Don't.

I Have No Explanation For Complex Biological Design. All I Know Is That God Isn't A Good Explanation, So We Must Wait And Hope That Somebody Comes Up With A Better One.

Evolution Has Been Observed. It's Just That It Hasn't Been Observed While It's Happening.

Explaining Is A Difficult Art. You Can Explain Something So That Your Reader Understands The Words; And You Can Explain Something So That The Reader Feels It In The Marrow Of His Bones. To Do The Latter, It Sometimes Isn't Enough To Lay The Evidence Before The Reader In A Dispassionate Way. You Have To Become An Advocate And Use The Tricks Of The Advocate's Trade.

Design Can Never Be An Ultimate Explanation For Anything. It Can Only Be A Proximate Explanation. A Plane Or A Car Is Explained By A Designer But That's Because The Designer Himself, The Engineer, Is Explained By Natural Selection.

I'm A Sucker For Nice Religious Leaders. I Fall For It Every Time.

Francis [collins] Keeps Saying Things Like "from The Perspective Of A Believer." Once You Buy Into The Position Of Faith, Then Suddenly You Find Yourself Losing All Of Your Natural Skepticism And Your Scientific - Really Scientific - Credibility. I'm Sorry To Be So Blunt.

Finding Yourself

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Louis D. Brandeis

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