The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution

by Richard Dawkins

Seeing is the kind of activity that can go on only in the kind of universe where what you see is stars.

A living creature is always in the business of surviving in its own environment. It is never unfinished—or, in another sense, it is always unfinished.

The resemblance between English and Japanese, or between Spanish and Basque, is so slight that no pair of living organisms can be chosen for analogy, not even humans and bacteria. Humans and bacteria have DNA sequences which are so similar that whole paragraphs are word-for-word identical.