The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution
Richard Dawkins
Top 10 Best Quotes
“My objection to supernatural beliefs is precisely that they miserably fail to do justice to the sublime grandeur of the real world. They represent a narrowing-down from reality, an impoverishment of what the real world has to offer.”
“More poignant for us, at Laetoli in Tanzania are the companionable footprints of three real hominids, probably Australopithecus afarensis, walking together 3.6 million years ago in what was then fresh volcanic ash. Who does not wonder what these individuals were to each other, whether they held hands or even talked, and what forgotten errand they shared in a Pliocene dawn?”
“Natural selection is a beguiling counterfeiter of deliberate purpose.”
“Look at life from our perspective, and you eukaryotes will soon cease giving yourselves such airs. You bipedal apes, you stump-tailed tree-shrews, you desiccated lobe-fins, you vertebrated worms, you Hoxed-up sponges, you newcomers on the block, you eukaryotes, you barely distinguishable congregations of a monotonously narrow parish, you are little more than fancy froth on the surface of bacterial life. Why, the very cells that build you are themselves colonies of bacteria, replaying the same old tricks we bacteria discovered a billion years ago. We were here before you arrived, and we shall be here after you are gone.”
“Evolution is a trajectory through multidimensional space, in which every step of the way has to represent a body capable of surviving and reproducing about as well as the parental type reached by the preceding step of the trajectory.”
“A herp is simply the kind of animal studied by a herpetologist, and that is a pretty lame way to define an animal. The only other name that comes close is the biblical 'creeping thing”
“There is much that we are unsure about in science. Where science scores over alternative world views is that we know our uncertainty, we can often measure its magnitude, and we work optimistically to reduce it.”
“Natural selection is a strong enough theory to be predictive in this fashion, now that science no longer needs convincing of its truth.”
“Just by chance, you could happen to give all your mother’s versions to your child, and none of your father’s. In this case, your father would have given no DNA to his grandchild. Of course such a scenario is highly unlikely, but as we go down to more distant descendants, total non-contribution of DNA becomes more possible.”
“Just as a linguist penetrates the past to Proto-Indo-European, triangulating from modern languages and from already reconstructed dead languages, we can do the same with modern organisms, comparing either their external characteristics or their protein or DNA sequences.”
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Book Keywords:
scientific-arrogance, blindness-of-science, arrogance, science
