No matter how much knowledge and wisdom you acquire during your life, not one jot will be passed on to your children by genetic means. Each new generation starts from scratch.
Interpretation
Knowledge doesn't transfer genetically; each generation must learn anew.
Richard Dawkins emphasizes that despite the accumulation of knowledge and wisdom throughout one's life, these attributes are not inherited genetically. Each generation begins with a blank slate, highlighting the importance of individual learning and the necessity for each person to seek understanding and wisdom for themselves.
In practice
During a graduation speech to inspire students about the importance of actively seeking knowledge.
No educated person believes the Adam and Eve myth nowadays, but it's surprising how many parents think that it's somehow fun to pass on this falsehood to their children...I would want to argue that the truth of evolution is more interesting and more poetic
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 worst than ignorant, they are the deluded to the point of perversity.
The population of the U.S. is nearly 300 million, including many of the best educated, most talented, most resourceful, humane people on earth. By almost any measure of civilised attainment, from Nobel prize-counts on down, the U.S. leads the world by miles.
When you make machines that are capable of obeying instructions slavishly, and among those instructions are 'duplicate me' instructions, then of course the system is wide open to exploitation by parasites.
Even if not a single fossil has ever been found, the evidence from surviving animals would still overwhelmingly force the conclusion that Darwin was right.
The bitter hatreds that now poison Middle Eastern politics are rooted in the real or perceived wrong of the setting up of a Jewish State in an Islamic region. In view of all that the Jews had been through, it must have seemed a fair and humane solution. Probably deep familiarity with the Old Testament had given the European and American decision-makers some sort of idea that this really was the historic homeland of the Jews.
There is something truer and more real, than what we can see with the eyes, and touch with the finger.
You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too.
Such is my veneration for every religion that reveals the attributes of the Deity, or a future state of rewards and punishments, that I had rather see the opinions of Confucius or Mahomed inculcated upon our youth than see them grow up wholly devoid of a system of religious principles.
The only way to reconcile science and religion is to set up something which is not science and something that is not religion.
Poverty is not just a sad accident, but it's also a result of the fact that some people make a lot of money off low-income families and directly contribute to their poverty.
It is always quietly thrilling to find yourself looking at a world you know well but have never seen from such an angle before.
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