The Blind Watchmaker Quotes

“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, The Blind Watchmaker

“The Bishop goes on to the human eye, asking rhetorically, and with the implication that there is no answer, 'How could an organ so complex evolve?' This is not an argument, it is simply an affirmation of incredulity.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design

“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, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design

“The important thing to remember about mathematics is not to be frightened”
― Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design

“The resemblance of the signs of the zodiac to the animals after which they are named... is as unimpressive as the predictions of astrologers.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design

“Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distance target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection, although human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design

“If a curiously selective plague came along and killed all people of intermediate height, 'tall' and 'short' would come to have just as precise a meaning as 'bird' or 'mammal'. The same is true of human ethics and law. Our legal and moral systems are deeply species-bound. The director of a zoo is legally entitled to 'put down' a chimpanzee that is surplus to requirements, while any suggestion that he might 'put down' a redundant keeper or ticket-seller would be greeted with howls of incredulous outrage. The chimpanzee is the property of the zoo. Humans are nowadays not supposed to be anybody's property, yet the rationale for discriminating against chimpanzees in this way is seldom spelled out, and I doubt if there is a defensible rationale at all. Such is the breathtaking speciesism of our attitudes, the abortion of a single human zygote can arouse more moral solicitude and righteous indignation than the vivisection of any number of intelligent adult chimpanzees! [T]he only reason we can be comfortable with such a double standard is that the intermediates between humans and chimps are all dead.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design

“…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, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design

“In the case of living machinery, the ‘designer’ is unconscious natural selection, the blind watchmaker.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design

“Words are our servants, not our masters.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design

“در دنیا آدم‌هایی هستند که ناامیدانه تلاش در نپذیرفتن تکامل داروینی دارند. به نظر می‌رسد آنها به سه گروه تقسیم می‌شوند، آنهایی که به دلایل مذهبی می‌خواهند تکامل دروغ باشد. آنهایی که دلیلی برای انکار تکامل نمی‌یابند اما به دلایل سیاسی یا اعتقادی مفهوم انتخاب طبیعی را ظالمانه و دور از انصاف می‌داند یا گرایشات نژادپرستانه آنها با تکامل ناسازگار است و در آخر آن‌هایی که با مخالفت می‌توانند هیاهو ایجاد کنند و برنامه‌های مردم‌پسند خوبی تهیه کنند.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design

“The arms race between [predators] and [prey] is asymmetric, in which success on either side is felt as failure by the other side, but the nature of the success and failure on the two sides is very different. The two sides are 'trying' to do very different things. [Predators] are trying to eat [prey]. [Prey] are not trying to eat [predators], they are trying to avoid being eaten by [predators].
From an evolutionary point of view asymmetric arms races are more [likely] to generate highly complex weapons systems.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design

“[O]ur percept is an elaborate computer model in the brain, constructed on the basis of information coming from [the environment], but transformed in the head into a form in which that information can be used. Wavelength differences in the light out there become coded as 'colour' differences in the computer model in the head. Shape and other attributes are encoded in the same kind of way, encoded into a form that is convenient to handle. The sensation of seeing is, for us, very different from the sensation of hearing, but this cannot be directly due to the physical differences between light and sound. Both light and sound are, after all, translated by the respective sense organs into the same kind of nerve impulses. It is impossible to tell, from the physical attributes of a nerve impulse, whether it is conveying information about light, about sound or about smell. The reason the sensation of seeing is so different from the sensation of hearing and the sensation of smelling is that the brain finds it convenient to use different kinds of internal model of the visual world, the world of sound and the world of smell. It is because we internally use our visual information and our sound information in different ways and for different purposes that the sensations of seeing and hearing are so different. It is not directly because of the physical differences between light and sound.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design

“Os livros de física podem ser complicados, mas eles, assim como os carros e os computadores, são produtos de objetos biológicos - cérebros humanos. Os objetos e os fenômenos que um livro de física descreve são mais simples que uma única célula do corpo de seu autor. E o autor consiste em trilhões de células, muitas delas diferentes umas das outras, organizadas com arquitetura intrincada e engenharia de precisão para formar uma máquina capaz de escrever um livro.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design

“if a design is good enough to evolve once, the same design principle is good enough to evolve twice, from different starting points, in different parts of the animal kingdom.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design

“The physicist’s problem is the problem of ultimate origins and ultimate natural laws. The biologist’s problem is the problem of complexity.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design

“however many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead, or rather not alive. You may throw cells together at random, over and over again for a billion years, and not once will you get a conglomeration that flies or swims or burrows or runs, or does anything, even badly, that could remotely be construed as working to keep itself alive.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design

“[T]he form that an animal's subjective experience takes will be a property of the internal computer model. That model will be designed, in evolution, for its suitability for useful internal representation, irrespective of the physical stimuli that come to it from outside. Bats and we need the same kind of internal model for representing the position of objects in three-dimensional space. The fact that bats construct their internal model with the aid of echoes, while we construct ours with the aid of light, is irrelevant.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design

“Sözcükler bizim hizmetkârlarımızdır, efendilerimiz değil.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design

“O darwinismo é uma teoria de processos cumulativos tão lentos que se desenrolam ao longo de milhares e milhões de anos. Todos os nossos juízos intuitivos sobre o que é provável mostram-se errados por larga margem.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design

“رویدادهایی که ما آنها را معجزه می‌نامیم خارق‌العاده نیستند بلکه جزئی از یک طیف رویدادهای کمابیش نامحتمل‌اند. به‌عبارت‌دیگر معجزه اگر اصلاً وجود داشته باشد اصابت شانس است.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design

“Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose. Physics is the study of simple things that do not tempt us to invoke design.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design

“It is raining DNA outside.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design

“[W]e may now be on the threshold of a new kind of genetic takeover. DNA replicators built 'survival machines' for themselves — the bodies of living organisms including ourselves. As part of their equipment, bodies evolved onboard computers — brains. Brains evolved the capacity to communicate with other brains by means of language and cultural traditions. But the new milieu of cultural tradition opens up new possibilities for self-replicating entities. The new replicators are not DNA and they are not clay crystals. They are patterns of information that can thrive only in brains or the artificially manufactured products of brains — books, computers, and so on. But, given that brains, books and computers exist, these new replicators, which I called memes to distinguish them from genes, can propagate themselves from brain to brain, from brain to book, from book to brain, from brain to computer, from computer to computer.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design

“Many of us have no grasp of quantum theory, or Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity, but this does not in itself lead us to oppose these theories! Darwinism, unlike ‘Einsteinism’, seems to be regarded as fair game for critics with any degree of ignorance.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design

“Like mathematics, it doesn’t only stretch the imagination. It also disciplines and controls it.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design

“避免死亡是必须努力才能达到的目标。要是“随它去”的话——那也是死亡后的状态——身体就会朝向回复与环境平衡的状态发展。要是你测量活的生物体的某些量，例如温度、酸度、含水量或电位，你通常会发现它们与周遭环境有显著差异。举例来说，我们的体温通常比环境的温度高，在寒冷气候中，身体必须费很大劲才能维持这个温度差。我们死后，身体就停止干活，温度差开始消失，最后体温与环境一致。不是所有的动物都同样地努力避免体温与环境的温度平衡，但是所有动物都会干某种相当的活儿。举例来说，在干燥的地区，动物和植物都得努力维持细胞中的水含量，对抗水的自然倾向——从湿度高的地方流向湿度低的地方。不成功便成仁，这可是生死攸关之事。更广泛地说，要是生物不主动努力防止水分从体内散失，它们到头来就会与环境融合，不再是自主的存有物。那是它们死后发生的事。

非生物不会这么干活儿，人工机器除外——我们已经同意把它们视为荣誉生物。非生物接受那些使它们与环境平衡的力量，任凭摆布。布朗峰已经存在了很长时间，我知道，它也许还会继续存在一阵子，但是它不会努力活着。岩石要是受重力的影响而躺在某处，它就躺在那儿。它什么都不必做，就能继续躺在那儿。布朗峰现在存在，会继续存在，直到风雨磨蚀了它，或它让地震震垮。它不会采取措施修补磨蚀、龟裂，或者震垮后再复原，生物的身体就会。非生物只是服从物理学的一般定律。”
― Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design

“Staving off death is a thing that you have to work at. Left to itself -​ ​and that is what it is when it dies​ ​- the body tends to revert to a state of​ equilibrium with its environment.”
― Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design

“I can imagine some other world in which a conference of learned, and totally blind, bat-like creatures is flabbergasted to be told of animals called humans that are actually capable of using the newly discovered inaudible rays called "light" for finding their way about. These otherwise humble humans are almost totally deaf (well, they can hear after a fashion and even utter a few ponderously slow, deep drawling growls, but they only use these sounds for rudimentary purposes like communicating with each other; they don't seem capable of using them to detect even the most massive objects). They have, instead, highly specialized organs called "eyes" for exploiting "light" rays. The sun is the main source of light rays, and humans, remarkably, manage to exploit the complex echoes that bounce off objects when light rays from the sun hit them. They have an ingenious device called a "lens", whose shape appears to be mathematically calculated so that it bends these silent rays in such a way that there is an exact one-to-one mapping between objects in the world and an "image" on a sheet of cells called the "retina". Theses retinal cells are capable of, in some mysterious way, of rendering the light "audible" (one might say), and they relay their information to the brain. Our mathematicians have shown that it is theoretically possible, by doing the right highly complex calculations, to navigate safely through the world using these light rays, just as effectively as one can in the ordinary way using ultrasound -- in some respects even more effectively! But who would have thought that a humble human could do these calculations?”
― Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design

“آنچه را یک کودن بفهمد، کودن دیگر هم می‌تواند بفهمد!”
― Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design