The Magic of Reality

by Richard Dawkins

For reality doesn’t just consist of the things we already know about: it also includes things that exist but that we don’t know about yet and won’t know about until some future time, perhaps when we have built better instruments to assist our five senses.

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.

Rocks don’t feel joy or jealousy, and mountains do not love.

Here’s a typical origin myth, from a group of Tasmanian aborigines. A god called Moinee was defeated by a rival god called Dromerdeener in a terrible battle up in the stars. Moinee fell out of the stars down to Tasmania to die. Before he died, he wanted to give a last blessing to his final resting place, so he decided to create humans.

did. The name of their chief god was Odin, sometimes called Wotan or Woden, from which we get our ‘Wednesday’.

Thursday’ comes from another Norse god, Thor, the god of thunder, which he made with his mighty hammer.)

Believe it or not, your 185-million-greats-grandfather was – a fish. So was your 185-million-greats-grandmother, which is just as well or they couldn’t have mated with each other and you wouldn’t be here.

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

Animals belong to different species if they don’t breed together.

English picked up ‘shampoo’ from Hindi, ‘iceberg’ from Norwegian, ‘bungalow’ from Bengali and ‘anorak’ from Inuit.

Evolution means change in a gene pool. Change in a gene pool means that some genes become more numerous, others less. Genes that used to be common become rare, or disappear altogether. Genes that used to be rare become common. And the result is that the shape, or size, or colour, or behaviour of typical members of the species changes: it evolves, because of changes in the numbers of genes in the gene pool. That is what evolution is.

Natural selection nudges evolution in a purposeful direction: namely, the direction of survival.

Bears and ground squirrels are among the many mammals, and quite a lot of other kinds of animals, that hibernate.

In the Japanese Shinto religion the sun is the goddess Amaterasu,

People in western Ireland or the Scottish isles dig up the peat and cut it into brick-sized chunks, which they burn as fuel, to keep their houses warm in winter.

Here’s one of the Pan Gu myths. In the beginning there was no clear distinction between Heaven and Earth: it was all one gooey mess surrounding a big black egg.

According to the modern version of the big bang model, the entire observable universe exploded into existence between 13 and 14 billion years ago.

The wave travels at a fixed speed, regardless of whether the source of the sound is a trumpet or a speaking voice or a car: about 768 miles per hour in air (four times faster under water, and even faster in some solids).

a 1992 poll concluded that nearly four million Americans thought they had been abducted by aliens.

those individual animals that act as though Sod’s Law were true are more likely to survive and reproduce than those individual animals that follow Pollyanna’s Law.

A great American scientist called Richard Feynman tragically lost his wife to tuberculosis, and the clock in her room stopped at precisely the moment she died. Goose-pimples! But Dr Feynman was not a great scientist for nothing. He worked out the true explanation. The clock was faulty. If you picked it up and tilted it, it tended to stop. When Mrs Feynman died, the nurse needed to record the time for the official death certificate. The sickroom was rather dark, so she picked up the clock and tilted it towards the window in order to read it. And that was the moment at which the clock stopped.

All four of the gospels, by the way, were written long after the events that they purport to describe, and not one of them by an eye witness.

Science has its own magic: the magic of reality.