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“... David Jenkins, the controversial bishop of Durham, the Scots Episcopalian bishop of Edinburgh, Richard Holloway, and the Anglican atheist Don Cupitt belong more convincingly in liberal ranks than with authentic enemies of the Enlightenment on the Christian right. We should not discount the vital progressive function performed by a learned clergy exposed to ...”

“... of Francis Spufford’s engaging new book calls them, meaning above all Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins – believe in spite of all evidence that eventually the religious will see sense. And yet with their magical belief in the truth of science – their taking for granted a consensus about the value of scientific evidence – and their ...”

“... is the public benefit in donations made for the advancement of religion? You don’t have to be Richard Dawkins to query how much of what religious organisations do in the name of a chosen deity or charismatic spiritual leader is of benefit to the rest of us, or to wonder why the beliefs of the members of the British Humanist Association should deny it ...”

“... the only ones hungry for these insights. The popularisation of behavioural economics was led by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s book Nudge (2008), which inspired the setting-up of ‘behavioural insights’ teams in governments around the world (with Cameron’s coalition government at the forefront), and has nurtured a view of policy that is attentive ...”

“... or the magical or any such claptrap. I despise myths and legends and their ilk. I believe that Richard Dawkins does not go nearly far enough when he says that astrologers should be prosecuted for fraud. Instead, priests and imams and monks and rabbis from every religion should be thrown into prison, unless and until they can prove the truth of their ...”

“... to his cost, was not his strong suit. Hamilton’s obituarists were not timid in their assessment: Richard Dawkins called him ‘a good candidate for the title of most distinguished Darwinian since Darwin’. His most important contribution was a Darwinian explanation of altruism, a problem over which Darwin himself admitted to having had sleepless ...”

“... details are not entirely accurate – Hans Driesch’s name is consistently misspelled and Richard Dawkins is awarded a Nobel Prize (in what field?) – but Kolata is particularly good at providing accessible explanations of scientific ideas and achievements, and even those who know very little about contemporary biology should be able to follow ...”

“... and heard in it, to my discomfort, the most enormous howl of grief. The social industry, as Richard Seymour calls it, doesn’t just produce new doubles with every keystroke, it also enables casual sadism. ‘Come for the nectar of approval,’ Klein quotes Seymour. ‘Stay for the frisson of virtual death.’Klein saves up for the end of her book the ...”

“... witty criticisms of recent exclusions by natural scientists into sociobiology, such as those of Richard Dawkins, the behaviour of whose selfish gene is compared with that of a successful Chicago gangster. Ross’s book is marred, however, by its advocacy of the least compelling of all forms of ecological thought – the ‘post-scarcity’ tradition of ...”

“... the dreadful but quiet war of organic beings going on in the peaceful woods & smiling fields.’ Richard Dawkins wrote in River out of Eden that ‘the total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive; others are ...”

“... This is true, but it is also obvious to almost everyone: even Lewontin’s favourite enemy, Richard Dawkins, is well aware of it. In fact, however, the last part of Lewontin’s book is devoted to a different kind of interaction. In a chapter entitled ‘The Genome as the Unit of Selection’ he argues that genes at different loci (i.e. at ...”

“... the professor that the advantage of equations, like the strategy of hawks, is frequency-dependent. Richard Dawkins may have correctly said, in his review of the book, that every Serengeti landrover should have one: but when the field biologist puts down his binoculars and takes up his copy of Maynard Smith he may not like what he finds. After the first ...”

“... In fact, the great structuralist student of myth and society sometimes sounds rather like Richard Dawkins on believers in god. So what we might find striking and special about Vidal-Naquet is that a scholar who spent so much time on, and ascribed so much social significance to cultural constructions, of the Other, of the marginal, of the ...”

“... has reached for a thematic solution. She relies throughout on the term ‘meme’, deployed by Richard Dawkins to mean the cultural equivalent of a gene: an idea or theme that mutates and changes in time and place while remaining fundamentally recognisable. From this follows the organisation of The English Romance in Time into eight ...”

“... of characteristics which, from less blinkered perspectives, gives it a distinctive identity. Pace Richard Dawkins, it is wrong to say that humans, animals or plants are ‘merely vehicles for genes’. If they were, we could never have distinguished between them before the dawn of genetic science. It would be wrong to imagine that edifying talk – of ...”