Quotes by Biologists - Page 12

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
Charles Darwin
Рассмотрим представление о Боге. Мы не знаем, как оно возникло в мимофонде. Возможно, оно возникало многократно путем независимых «мутаций». Во всяком случае это очень старая идея. Как она реплицируется? С помощью устного и письменного слова, подкрепляемого великой музыкой и изобразительным искусством. Почему эта идея обладает такой высокой выживаемостью? Напомним, что в данном случае «выживаемость» означает не выживание гена в генофонде, а выживание мима в мимофонде. На самом деле вопрос состоит в следующем: в чем та «особость» идеи о Боге, которая придает ей такую стабильность и способность проникать в культурную среду? Выживаемость хорошего мима, входящего в мимофонд, обусловливается его большой психологической привлекательностью. Идея Бога дает на первый взгляд приемлемый ответ на глубокие и волнующие вопросы о смысле существования. Она позволяет надеяться, что несправедливость на этом свете может быть вознаграждена на том свете. «Всегда протянутые руки», готовые поддержать нас в минуты нашей слабости, которые, подобно плацебо, отнюдь не теряют своей действенности, хотя и существуют лишь в нашем воображении. Вот некоторые из причин, по которым идея Бога с такой готовностью копируется последовательными поколениями индивидуальных мозгов. Бог существует, пусть лишь в форме мима с высокой выживаемостью или инфекционностью, в среде, создаваемой человеческой культурой.
Richard Dawkins
We are social animals. We like to feel a part of something of beauty and power that transcends our insignificance. It can be a religion, a political party, a ball club. Why not also Nature? I feel a strong identity with the world of living things. I was born into it; we all were. But we may not feel the ties unless we gain intimacy by seeing, feeling, smelling, touching and studying the natural world. Trying to live in harmony with the dictates of nature is probably as inspirational as living in harmony with the Koran or the Bible. Perhaps it is also a timely undertaking.
Bernd Heinrich
The limit of man s knowledge in any subject possesses a high interest which is perhaps increased by its close neighbourhood to the realms of imagination.
Charles Darwin
My main reason for scepticism about the Huxley/Sagan theory is that the human brain is demonstrably eager to see faces in random patterns, as we know from scientific evidence, on top of the numerous legends about faces of Jesus, or the Virgin Mary, or Mother Teresa, being seen on slices of toast, or pizzas, or patches of damp on a wall. This eagerness is enhanced if the pattern departs from randomness in the specific direction of being symmetrical.
Richard Dawkins
Real life seeks the gentle slopes at the back of Mount Improbable, while creationists are blind to all but the daunting precipice at the front.
Richard Dawkins
Do those people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration tomoral rectitude have the slightest notion of what is actually writtenin it?
Richard Dawkins
Why, I can't help wondering, is God thought to need such ferociousdefence? One might have supposed him amply capable of lookingafter himself.
Richard Dawkins
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 mixes explosively with (and gives strong sanction to) 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. Without a doubt it is the prime aggravator of the Middle East. Those of us who have for years politely concealed our contempt for the dangerous collective delusion of religion need to stand up and speak out. Things are different now. ‘All is changed, changed utterly.
Richard Dawkins
The take-home message is that we should blame religion itself, not religious extremism - as though that were some kind of terrible perversion of real, decent religion. Voltaire got it right long ago: 'Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.' So did Bertrand Russell: 'Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.
Richard Dawkins
Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that.
Richard Dawkins
Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is the belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.
Richard Dawkins
To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and 'improved' by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries
Richard Dawkins
Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.
Richard Dawkins
A child is not a Christian child, not a Muslim child, but a child of Christian parents or a child of Muslim parents. This latter nomenclature, by the way, would be an excellent piece of consciousness-raising for the children themselves. A child who is told she is a 'child of Muslim parents' will immediately realize that religion is something for her to choose -or reject- when she becomes old enough to do so.
Richard Dawkins
Do not empower your negative thoughts by giving them “legs” so they can run around your mind, creating worries,frustrations, and anxiety in your life.
Rodolfo Costa
It took a couple of months before we were both convinced there were no rules about sexual activities in Hell and our spouses were not going to show up out of the blue. It was hard to start a sexual relationship in circumstances of such bizarre uncertainty, especially for an active Mormon and a good Christian, both lost in a Zoroastrian Hell. We were like virgin newlyweds. All my life I’d been raised to believe this kind of thing was wrong. All my life I had lived with a strong sense of morality. How do you give it up? How do you do things you thought you’d never do? Where do all the things you believed go, when all the supporting structure is found to be a myth? How do you know how or on what to take a moral stand, how do you behave when it turns out there are no cosmic rules, no categorical imperatives? It was difficult. So tricky to untangle.
Steven L. Peck
What we call rational grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts.
Thomas Henry Huxley
The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.
Richard Dawkins
Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.
Richard Dawkins
Science is the poetry of reality.
Richard Dawkins
When I am dying, I should like my life taken out under general anaesthetic, exactly as if it were a diseased appendix.
Richard Dawkins
The days passed in a dream. I pictured our reunion again and again, played it out in my mind over and over until I’d almost worn a groove in my thoughts, so deep that it seemed the only thing I could think of was our reunion. Anticipation is a gift. Perhaps there is none greater. Anticipation is born of hope. Indeed it is hope’s finest expression. In hope’s loss, however, is the greatest despair.
Steven L. Peck
Many people are so poor that the only thing they have is money. Cultivate your spiritual growth.
Rodolfo Costa
I am happy that I can aid those admirable men, both living and dead, who by their pens or their tongues have aided the great cause of human liberty and universal happiness.
James Watson
Every day, you get the opportunity to change your life. Change what you do not want. Change what makes you unhappy.
Rodolfo Costa
Take responsibility for your own happiness, do not expect people or things to bring you happiness, or you could be disappointed.
Rodolfo Costa
Learn to love someone when they least deserve it, because that is when they need your love most.
Rodolfo Costa
Erase from your vocabulary the word “someday.” Do not save things for “special occasions.” Take into account the fact that every day is special. Every day is a gift that we must appreciate and be thankful for. Wear your attractive clothes, wear your nice perfume, use your fine silverware and dishes, and drink from your expensive crystal glasses … just because. Live every day to the fullest and savor every minute of it.
Rodolfo Costa
I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.
J.B.S. Haldane
[Y]ou are here to learn something. Don’t try to figure out what it is. This can be frustrating and unproductive.
Steven L. Peck
During the Allied invasion of World War II, hundreds of life-like rubber dummy paratroopers were dropped into the French countryside. These distractions drew German fire away from the Allies and wasted a great deal of the Germans' ammunition and other military resources. While the Germans were busy firing at dummies, Allied troops were busy sneaking behind enemy lines. The real battle was taking place elsewhere, while the unwitting Germans were squandering their firepower and energy on mere rubber dummies.1 I submit to you, as Christians we are attacking the “rubber dummy” of evolution, while the real enemy slips past us unnoticed and unchallenged. How will we answer God on judgment day when He asks us why we pointlessly besieged so many distractions, meanwhile the real battle was taking place elsewhere?
Aaron R. Yilmaz
There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else (parents in the case of children, God in the case of adults) has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point. . . . The truly adult view, by contrast, 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.
Richard Dawkins
We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
Richard Dawkins
Why would an all-powerful creator decide to plant his carefully crafted species on islands and continents in exactly the appropriate pattern to suggest, irresistibly, that they had evolved and dispersed from the site of their evolution?
Richard Dawkins
So it is best to keep an open mind and be agnostic. At first sight that seems an unassailable position, at least in the weak sense of Pascal's wager. But on second thoughts it seems a cop-out, because the same could be said of Father Christmas and tooth fairies. 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?
Richard Dawkins
Do you really mean to tell me the only reason you try to be good is to gain God's approval and reward, or to avoid his disapproval and punishment? That's not morality, that's just sucking up, apple-polishing, looking over your shoulder at the great surveillance camera in the sky, or the still small wiretap inside your head, monitoring your every move, even your every base though.
Richard Dawkins
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
Richard Dawkins
We are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with truth as far as our reason permits us to discover it.
Charles Darwin
Zoroastrianism? Oh, there’s never been but a few hundred thousand of them at any one time, mostly located in Iran and India, but that’s it. The one true faith. If you’re not a Zoroastrian, I’m afraid you are bound for Hell.”The man looked stunned and shocked. "It's not fair." The demon gave a mirthful laugh. “Well, it was fair when you were sending all the Chinese to Hell who had never heard of Jesus. Wasn’t it?
Steven L. Peck
False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for everyone takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness; and when this is done, one path towards error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened.
Charles Darwin
The scientific spirit is of more value than its products, and irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.
Thomas Henry Huxley
Think? Why think! We have computers to do that for us.
Jean Rostand
Creationists eagerly seek a gap in present-day knowledge or understanding. If an apparent gap is found, it is assumed that God, by default, must fill it.
Richard Dawkins
...when two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong.
Richard Dawkins
Sufficiently simple natural structures are predictable but uncontrollable, whereas sufficiently complex symbolic descriptions are controllable but unpredictable.
Howard Pattee
Which do you think is more valuable to humanity?a. Finding ways to tell humans that they have free will despite the incontrovertible fact that their actions are completely dictated by the laws of physics as instantiated in our bodies, brains and environments? That is, engaging in the honored philosophical practice of showing that our notion of "free will" can be compatible with determinism?orb. Telling people, based on our scientific knowledge of physics, neurology, and behavior, that our actions are predetermined rather than dictated by some ghost in our brains, and then sussing out the consequences of that conclusion and applying them to society?Of course my answer is b).
Jerry A. Coyne
There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point… The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it.
R. Dawkins
Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. I have read and heard many attempts at a systematic account of it, from materialism and theosophy to the Christian system or that of Kant, and I have always felt that they were much too simple. I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth that are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy. That is the reason why I have no philosophy myself, and must be my excuse for dreaming.
J.B.S. Haldane
We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
Richard Dawkins
Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do.
Richard Dawkins
Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind since I have resolved at all risks to do this.
Thomas Henry Huxley
People would rather believe than know.
Edward O. Wilson
After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings.
Richard Dawkins
Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
Charles Darwin
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?
Richard Dawkins
I had a dream about you last night. The best day of my life was when I taught you how to juggle, but the best day of yours was when you taught someone else.
Michael Summers
There is no better high than discovery.
Edward O. Wilson
I had a dream about you last night. I could fly. I was going to use this power to impress you, but you were too heavy to carry, so I won you over with my personality instead
Michael Summers
I had a dream about you last night. The champagne was non-alcoholic. You didn't notice, and laughed at my jokes anyway.
Michael Summers