“It is the plain truth that we are cousins of chimpanzees, somewhat more distant cousins of monkeys, more distant cousins still of aardvarks and manatees, yet more distant cousins of bananas and turnips.”
“Mathematicians can prove things – according to one strict view, they are the only people who can – but the best that scientists can do is fail to disprove things while pointing to how hard they tried.”
“Careful inference can be more reliable than ‘actual observation’, however strongly our intuition protests at admitting it.”
“Nowadays it is no longer possible to dispute the fact of evolution itself – it has graduated to become a theorum or obviously supported fact – but it could still (just) be doubted that natural selection is its major
driving force.”
“Evolution is within us, around us, between us, and its workings are embedded in the rocks of eons past.”
“If the history-deniers who doubt the fact of evolution are ignorant of biology, those who think the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worse than ignorant, they are deluded to the point of perversity. They are denying not only the facts of biology but those of physics, geology, cosmology, archaeology, history and chemistry as well.”
“Evolution could so easily be disproved if just a single fossil turned up in the wrong date order. Evolution has passed this test with flying colours.”
“Even if not a single fossil had ever been found, the evidence from surviving animals would still overwhelmingly force the conclusion that Darwin was right.”
“Evolution is not a genetically controlled distortion of one adult form into another; it is a genetically controlled alteration in a developmental program.”
“Scientists are human, and they are as entitled as anyone to revile cruelty and abhor suffering. But good scientists like Darwin recognize that truths about the real world, however distasteful, have to be faced.”
“The nervous system has a rule that says, ‘Any trial action that is followed by reward should be repeated. Any trial action that is followed by nothing, or, worse, followed by punishment, for example pain, should not be repeated.”
“Life evolves greater complexity only because natural selection drives it locally away from the statistically probable towards the improbable.”
“Oxygen flooded into the atmosphere as a pollutant, even a poison, until natural selection shaped living things to thrive on the stuff and, indeed, suffocate without it.”
The Guardian: Richard Dawkins's latest broadside just misses its target.
The New York Times: Evolution All Around
The Telegraph: The Greatest Show on Earth: the Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins: review
The Independent: The Greatest Show on Earth, By Richard Dawkins
Financial Times: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution