Quotes by Ethologists - Page 2

It requires a deliberate mental effort to turn biology the right way up again, and remind ourselves that the replicators come first, in importance as well as in history.
Richard Dawkins
Having escaped the Dark Ages in which animals were mere stimulus-response machines, we are free to contemplate their mental lives. It is a great leap forward, the one that Griffin fought for. But now that animal cognition is an increasingly popular topic, we are still facing the mindset that animal cognition can be only a poor substitute of what we humans have. It can’t be truly deep and amazing. Toward the end of a long career, many a scholar cannot resist shining a light on human talents by listing all the things we are capable of and animals not. From the human perspective, these conjectures may make a satisfactory read, but for anyone interested, as I am, in the full spectrum of cognitions on our planet, they come across as a colossal waste of time. What a bizarre animal we are that the only question we can ask in relation to our place in nature is “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the smartest of them all?
Frans de Waal
Evolution by natural selection is the explanation for why we exist. It is not something to guide our lives in our own society. If we were to be guided by the evolution principle, then we would be living in a kind of ultra-Thatcherite, Reaganite society.Study your Darwinism for two reasons - because it explains why you’re here, and the second reason is, study your Darwinism in order to learn what to avoid in setting up society. What we need is a truly anti-Darwinian society. Anti-Darwinian in the sense that we don’t wish to live in a society where the weakest go to the wall, where the strongest suppress the weak, and even kill the weak. We — I, at least — do not wish to live in that kind of society. I want to live in the sort of society where we take care of the sick, where we take care of the weak, take care of the oppressed, which is a very anti-Darwinian society.
Richard Dawkins
If the second dinosaur to the left of the tall cycad tree had not happened to sneeze and thereby fail to catch the tiny, shrew-like ancestor of all the mammals, we should none of us be here.
Richard Dawkins
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.
Richard Dawkins
I am an enthusiastic Darwinian, but I think Darwinism is too big a theory to be confined to the narrow context of the gene.
Richard Dawkins
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.
Richard Dawkins
It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that).
Richard Dawkins
We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realize that we are apes.
Richard Dawkins
The chicken is only an egg’s way for making another egg.
Richard Dawkins
If God wanted to forgive our sins, why not just forgive them, without having himself tortured and executed in payment—thereby, incidentally, condemning remote future generations of Jews to pogroms and persecution as 'Christ-killers': did that hereditary sin pass down in the semen too?
Richard Dawkins
…the Genesis story is just one that happened to have been adopted by one particular tribe of Middle Eastern herders. It has no more special status than the belief of a particular West African tribe that the world was created from the excrement of ants.
Richard Dawkins
We can give up belief in God while not losing touch with a treasured heritage.
Richard Dawkins
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.
Richard Dawkins
It is possible to conceive, Anselm said, of a being than which nothing greater can be conceived. Even an atheist can conceive of such a superlative being, though he would deny its existence in the real world. But, goes the argument, a being that doesn't exist in the real world is, by that very fact, less than perfect. Therefore we have a contradiction and, hey presto, God exists!
Richard Dawkins
I have found it an amusing strategy, when asked whether I am an atheist, to point out that the questioner is also an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I just go one god further.
Richard Dawkins
The whole point of religious faith, its strength and chief glory, is that it does not depend on rational justification. The rest of us are expected to defend our prejudices. But ask a religious person to justify their faith and you infringe 'religious liberty'.
Richard Dawkins
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. What worries thoughtful theologians such as Bonhoeffer is that gaps shrink as science advances, and God is threatened with eventually having nothing to do and nowhere to hide.
Richard Dawkins
Maybe scientists are fundamentalist when it comes to defining in some abstract way what is meant by 'truth'. But so is everybody else. I am no more fundamentalist when I say evolution is true than when I say it is true that New Zealand is in the southern hemisphere. We believe in evolution because the evidence supports it, and we would abandon it overnight if new evidence arose to disprove it.
Richard Dawkins
Religion is a distraction from true education.
Richard Dawkins
There was something built into the human brain by natural selection which was once useful, and which now manifests itself as religion.
Richard Dawkins
I am passionate about the truth. Passion is very different from fundamentalism.
Richard Dawkins
Either blasphemy is a victimless crime or its victim is powerful enough to take care of himself without any help from you.
Richard Dawkins
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.
Richard Dawkins
All life, all intelligence, all creativity and all 'design' anywhere in the universe, is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection. It follows that design comes late in the universe, after a period of Darwinian evolution. Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.
Richard Dawkins
If you're an atheist, you know, you believe, this is the only life you're going to get. It's a precious life. It's a beautiful life. Its something we should live to the full, to the end of our days. Where if you're religious and you believe in another life somehow, that means you don't live this life to the full because you think you're going to get another one. That's an awfully negative way to live a life. Being a atheist frees you up to live this life properly, happily and fully
Richard Dawkins
Lacking a shared language, emotions are perhaps our most effective means of cross-species communication. We can share our emotions, we can understand the language of feelings, and that's why we form deep and enduring social bonds with many other beings. Emotions are the glue that binds.
Marc Bekoff
I sometimes try to imagine what would have happened if we'd known the bonobo first and the chimpanzee only later or not at all. The discussion about human evolution might not revolve as much around violence, warfare, and male dominance, but rather around sexuality, empathy, caring, and co-operation. What a different intellectual landscape we would occupy!”,Our Inner Ape
Frans de Waal
The book of nature is like the Bible: Everyone reads into it what they want, from tolerance to intolerance, and from altruism to greed. It’s good to realize, though, that if biologists never stop talking of competition, this doesn’t mean they advocate it, and if they call genes selfish, this doesn’t mean that genes actually are. Genes can’t be any more “selfish” than a river can be “angry,” or sun rays “loving.” Genes are little chunks of DNA. At most, they are “self-promoting,” because successful genes help their carriers spread more copies of themselves.
Frans de Waal
We have a tendency to describe the human condition in lofty terms, such as a quest for freedom or striving for a virtuous life, but the life sciences hold a more mundane view: It’s all about security, social companionships, and a full belly. There is obvious tension between both views, which recalls that famous dinner conversation between a Russian literary critic and the writer Ivan Turgenev: 'We haven’t yet solved the problem of God,' the critic yelled, 'and you want to eat!
Frans de Waal
The idea of a divine creator belittles the elegant reality of the universe.
Richard Dawkins
In very different ways, the possibility that the universe is teeming with life, and the opposite possibility that we are totally alone, are equally exciting. Either way, the urge to know more about the universe seems to me irresistible, and I cannot imagine that anybody of truly poetic sensibility could disagree.
Richard Dawkins
In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. 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.
Richard Dawkins
We generally accept that it's natural for carnivorous wild animals to kill other animals in order to live. But people don't often think (or even know) about the extraordinary and unnatural suffering that humans inflict on the animals that we freely harvest for food, with the help of modern high technology and the animal food sciences.
Marc Bekoff
A reduction of meat consumption by only 10% would result in about 12 million more tons of grain for human consumption. This additional grain could feed all of the humans across the world who starve to death each year- about 60 million people!
Marc Bekoff
Chance" is just a word expressing ignorance
Richard Dawkins
If this dysfunctional family was the best Sodom had to offer by way of morals, some might begin to feel a certain sympathy with God and his judicial brimstone.
Richard Dawkins
The fact that it has nothing else to contribute to human wisdom is no reason to hand religion a free licence to tell us what to do. Which religion, anyway? The one in which we happen to have been brought up? To which chapter, then, of which book of the Bible should we turn—for they are far from unanimous and some of them are odious by any reasonable standards. How many literalists have read enough of the Bible to know that the death penalty is prescribed for adultery, for gathering sticks on the sabbath and for cheeking your parents? If we reject Deuteronomy and Leviticus (as all enlightened moderns do), by what criteria do we then decide which of religion's moral values to accept? Or should we pick and choose among all the world's religions until we find one whose moral teaching suits us? If so, again we must ask, by what criterion do we choose? And if we have independent criteria for choosing among religious moralities, why not cut out the middle man and go straight for the moral choice without the religion?
Richard Dawkins
It is said that man is wolf to man. I find this very unfair to wolves.
Frans de Waal
Even the staunchest atheist growing up in Western society cannot avoid having absorbed the basic tenets of Christian morality. Our societies are steeped in it: everything we have accomplished over the centuries, even science, developed either hand in hand with or in opposition to religion, but never separately. It is impossible to know what morality would look like without religion. It would require a visit to a human culture that is not now and never was religious. That such cultures do not exist should give us pause.
Frans de Waal
More than any other product of human scientific culture scientific knowledge is the collective property of all mankind.
Konrad Lorenz
Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species.
Konrad Lorenz
I am fascinated by the evolution of language, and how local versions diverge to become dialects like Cornish English and Geordie and then imperceptibly diverge further to become mutually unintelligible but obviously related languages like German and Dutch. The analogy to genetic evolution is close enough to be illuminating and misleading at the same time. When populations diverge to become species, the time of separation is defined as the moment when they can no longer interbreed. I suggest that two dialects should be deemed to reach the status of separate languages when they have diverged to an analogously critical point: the point where, if a native speaker of one attempts to speak the other it is taken as a compliment rather than as an insult.
Richard Dawkins
More generally, as I shall repeat in Chapter 8, one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.
Richard Dawkins
Every danger loses some of its terror once its causes are understood.
Konrad Lorenz
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.
Richard Dawkins
The Bible may be an arresting andpoetic work of fiction, but it is not the sort of book you should giveyour children to form their morals.
Richard Dawkins
Often, the greater our ignorance about something, the greater our resistance to change.
Marc Bekoff
Why would anybody be intimidated by mere words? I mean, neither I nor any other athiest that I know ever threatens violence. We never threaten to fly planes into skyscrapers. We never threaten suicide bombs. We are very gentle people. All we do is use words to talk about things like the cosmos, the origin of the universe, evolution, the origin of life. What's there to be frightened of? It's just an opinion.
Richard Dawkins
I have considered the impudent accusations of Mr Dawkins with exasperation at his lack of serious scholarship. He has apparently not read the detailed discourses of Count Roderigo of Seville on the exquisite and exotic leathers of the Emperor's boots, nor does he give a moment's consideration to Bellini's masterwork, On the Luminescence of the Emperor's Feathered Hat. We have entire schools dedicated to writing learned treatises on the beauty of the Emperor's raiment, and every major newspaper runs a section dedicated to imperial fashion ... Dawkins arrogantly ignores all these deep philosophical ponderings to crudely accuse the Emperor of nudity ... Until Dawkins has trained in the shops of Paris and Milan, until he has learned to tell the difference between a ruffled flounce and a puffy pantaloon, we should all pretend he has not spoken out against the Emperor's taste. His training in biology may give him the ability to recognize dangling genitalia when he sees it, but it has not taught him the proper appreciation of Imaginary Fabrics.
Richard Dawkins
It is a tedious cliché (and, unlike many clichés, it isn't even true) that science concerns itself with how questions, but only theology is equipped to answer why questions. What on Earth is a why question? Not every English sentence beginning with the word 'why' is a legitimate question. Why are unicorns hollow? Some questions simply do not deserve an answer. What is the colour of abstraction? What is the smell of hope? The fact that a question can be phrased in a grammatically correct English sentence doesn't make it meaningful, or entitle it to our serious attention. Nor, even if the question is a real one, does the fact that science cannot answer it imply that religion can.
Richard Dawkins
That scientifically savvy philosopher Daniel Dennett pointed out that evolution counters one of the oldest ideas we have: 'the idea that it takes a big fancy smart thing to make a lesser thing. I call that the trickle-down theory of creation.
Richard Dawkins
Pantheism is sexed-up atheism. Deism is watered-down theism.
Richard Dawkins
Oh golly, Brer Fox, your forthright assertion—that evolutionary biology disproves the idea of a creator God—jeopardises the teaching of biology in science class, since teaching that would violate the separation of church and state!' Right. You also ought to soft-pedal physiology, since it declares virgin birth impossible
Richard Dawkins
Along with people in other creative professions, such as artists and musicians, many scientists experience this transcendence. I do so every day. For one, it's impossible to look an ape in the eye and not see oneself. There are other animals with frontally oriented eyes, but none that give you the shock of recognition of the ape's. Looking back at you is not so much an animal but a personality as solid and willful as yourself.
Frans de Waal
Let us remember that animals are not mere resources for human consumption. They are splendid beings in their own right, who have evolved alongside us as co-inheritors of all the beauty and abundance of life on this planet
Marc Bekoff
Problems arise when (especially) theologians use such metaphorical language without realizing that that is what they are doing, and without even realizing that there is a distinction between metaphor and reality – saying something like: ‘It is not important whether Jesus really fed the five thousand. What matters is what the idea of the story means to us.’ Actually it is important, because millions of devout people do believe the Bible is literally true.
Richard Dawkins
When I was young, I knew that, somehow, I would go to Africa and live with animals. And I wanted to write books about them. I don't think I spent too much time wondering exactly how I would do it. I just felt sure that the right opportunity would somehow come. I didn't feel frustrated because I could not go a really long trip while Rusty was still alive. It would have seemed like a betrayal. And while I waited I went on learning.
Goodall
The world and the universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more we understand about it the more beautiful does it appear. It is an immensely exciting experience to be born in the world, born in the universe, and look around you and realise that before you die you have the opportunity of understanding an immense amount about that world and about that universe and about life and about why we're here. We have the opportunity of understanding far, far more than any of our predecessors ever. That is such an exciting possibility, it would be such a shame to blow it and end your life not having understood what there is to understand.
Richard Dawkins
I don't give a damn for anybody's opinion, I only care about the facts. So I'm not an enthusiast for diversity of opinion where factual matters are concerned.
Richard Dawkins