Richard Dawkins Quotes

Everything that wasn't invented by God is invented by an engineer.

What we're looking at is God's design, nature's template, and using that as a pattern to cut around and lay it down on a domestic model to duplicate that pattern that we see in nature.

I like to come up first of all with a free idea, thinking about and obviously understanding what is necessary for it to become a car.

My training and my inclination is to invent.

I don't know whether the universe contains any evidence of intelligent design, but I can assure you that thousands of everyday products do not.

I had been impressed by the fact that biological systems were based on molecular machines and that we were learning to design and build these sorts of things.

Once you have speech, you don't have to wait for natural selection! If you want more strength, you build a stealth bomber; if you don't like bacteria, you invent penicillin; if you want to communicate faster, you invent the Internet. Once speech evolved, all of human life changed.

Engineering or Technology is the making of things that did not previously exist, whereas science is the discovering of things that have long existed.

I think of what I do as copying nature's design process.

For me, cooking is practical. That's the core of an engineer. Engineers are very practical designers and creative people. Every single thing I create has to have a purpose.

A brilliant mind having a eureka moment could not create an Intel microprocessor containing a billion transistors any more than one person could dream up a Boeing 787 from scratch.

A team that can build a stronger car, a stronger working environment. A team that has the possibility to create something, that would be interesting.

The future of design is a future where anything material in the environment - whether it's wearables, cars, buildings - can be designed with this variation of properties and relationship with the environment that can take part in the natural ecology.

I think design means, for me, almost when man, back in time, decided to do something conscious. You know... to shape something and make something different from just using things that were lying around. So whoever designed the wheel were onto a good thing.

Design in nature is but a concatenation of accidents, culled by natural selection until the result is so beautiful or effective as to seem a miracle of purpose.

Thus, in its relation to Christianity, intelligent design should be viewed as a ground-clearing operation that gets rid of the intellectual rubbish that for generations has kept Christianity from receiving serious consideration.

Darwin's greatest achievement was to show that the appearance of purpose, planning, teleology (design), and intentionality in the origin and development of human and animal species was entirely an illusion. The illusion could be explained by evolutionary processes that contained no such purpose at all. But the spread of ideas through imitation required the whole apparatus of human consciousness and intentionality

Design is a thinking process that starts in the head and with sketches. Thinking cannot be done by a computer.

I love working with technology because it allows me to follow my imagination and to invent new things.

I think the whole thing that Jamie [Hyneman] and I have in working together is that we are constantly simplifying each other's designs, and we both appreciate that the quickest and the dirtiest solution is usually the most elegant, the least expensive, and the fastest.

Electronic calculators can solve problems which the man who made them cannot solve; but no government-subsidized commission of engineers and physicists could create a worm.

All creative work begins by doing something with the hands. Creation is simply a problem and design is the way out.

In order to survive, all systems must evolve by providing greater and greater access to the currents that flow through them. This applies to all physical, biological and social systems that survive and thrive.... But let’s take that one step forward... the systems just described are ... constantly evolving. This suggests another design principle: ... design for evolution rather than creating a static design optimizing for the present.

The future is better than the past. Despite the crepe hangers, romanticists, and anti-intellectuals, the world steadily grows better because the human mind, applying itself to environment, makes it better. With hands ... with tools ... with horse sense and science and engineering.