The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True

by Richard Dawkins

If there are aliens in one of those colliding galaxies with a telescope powerful enough to see us, what they are seeing on Earth, at this very moment, here and now, is the early ancestors of the dinosaurs.

We should always be open-minded, but the only good reason to believe that something exists is if there is real evidence that it does.

We know a great deal about DNA and how it works. But you can’t see the details of what DNA looks like, even with a powerful microscope. Almost everything we know about DNA comes indirectly from dreaming up models and then testing them.

This is Darwin’s great idea, and it is called Evolution by Natural Selection. It is one of the most important ideas ever to occur to a human mind. It explains everything we know about life on Earth.

You can tell that FoxP2 is the same gene in all mammals because the great majority of the code letters are the same.

you can work out how closely related any two people are to each other by counting the number of DNA letters they share.

What is a fact beyond all doubt is that we share an ancestor with every other species of animal and plant on the planet.

Adam’s task of naming all the animals was a tough one – tougher than the ancient Hebrews could possibly have realized.

One of the reasons Australians have to be especially careful when sunbathing is that there is a ‘hole’ in the ozone layer in the far south.

A given amount of liquid, unlike the same amount of gas, keeps a fixed volume, and gravity pulls it downwards,

proposing a model and then testing it – what we call the ‘scientific method’ – has a much better chance of getting at the way things really are than even the most imaginative and beautiful myth

It isn’t really right to say that the nucleus is ‘matter’ like a football, and that there is ‘empty space’ until the next nucleus.

the full stop at the end of this sentence contains about a million million atoms of printing ink.

every possible number from 1 to 100 (and a few more), there is one and only one element that has that number of protons (and the same number of electrons). I won’t list them all, but it would be easy to do so.

small as it is, even a dust mite contains more than a hundred trillion atoms.

There’s even a frog in Alaska which goes so far as to freeze solid in a block of ice, thawing out and coming to life again in the spring.

Weight is the pull of gravity on your mass. On Earth we can use weight to measure mass because the pull is (more or less) the same everywhere.

An Egyptian legend regarded the curve of the sky as the body of the goddess Nut, arched over the Earth. Every night the goddess swallowed the sun, and then the following morning she gave birth to him again.

‘And God made two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.’

wow so majestic lol

It is hard to grasp how far away the stars are, how big space is. Actually, it’s more than hard, it’s almost impossible.

the sun is more than 300,000 times the mass of the Earth, which means that the mass of Eta Carinae is 30 million times that of the Earth.

The wonder is not that the dinosaurs died but that our mammal ancestors survived.

The intense heat of a steel mill or a blast furnace, the glowing fireboxes that sent the Victorians’ steam engines thundering along iron rails or their ships pounding through the sea: all that heat came originally from the sun, via the green leaves of plants that lived 300 million years ago.

Rainbows are not just beautiful to look at. In a way, they tell us when everything began, including time and space. I think that makes the rainbow even more beautiful.

A surprisingly large number of Americans, many of them otherwise normal, sincerely believe that they personally have been taken aboard flying saucers and been the victims of horrific experiments conducted by little grey men with large heads and huge, wraparound eyes.

We say that Earth orbits the sun, but actually the sun also makes tiny movements in response to the gravity of Earth.

Well, the most likely explanation is that they really are just that: coincidences, and nothing more. The key point is that we only bother to tell stories when strange coincidences happen – not when they don’t.

As it happens, we know that lots of fiction has been made up about this particular preacher called Jesus.

the truth has a magic of its own. The truth is more magical – in the best and most exciting sense of the word – than any myth or made-up mystery or miracle.