understanding Quotes

I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.

Science has taught us, against all intuition, that apparently solid things like crystals and rocks are really almost entirely composed of empty space. And the familiar illustration is the nucleus of an atom is a fly in the middle of a sports stadium, and the next atom is in the next sports stadium.

Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is explained by a designer but that's because the designer himself, the engineer, is explained by natural selection.

There's branches of science which I don't understand; for example, physics. It could be said, I suppose, that I have faith that physicists understand it better than I do.

Science, as opposed to technology, does violence to common sense.

For me, the level at which natural selection causes the phenomenon of adaptation is the level of the replicator - the gene.

Metaphors are fine if they aid understanding, but sometimes they get in the way.

Selfish genes actually explain altruistic individuals, and to me that's crystal-clear.

For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria.

Our animal origins are constantly lurking behind, even if they are filtered through complicated social evolution.