Science Quote by Richard Dawkins

Dawkins is defending an unfashionable idea in an age that rewards elegant one-liners: reality doesn’t owe us simplicity. The sentence is a preemptive strike against the lazy move where “hard to explain” gets treated as “not worth explaining,” or worse, “evidence of design.” By tying “complex” to “statistically improbable,” he welds intuition to mathematics: if something is rare in the space of possibilities, it shouldn’t arrive with a tidy story attached. Difficulty, in his framing, is not a flaw in the explanation; it’s part of the thing being explained.

The subtext is a rebuke to two audiences at once. To creationists (his frequent foil), it undercuts the rhetorical trick of calling complexity “mysterious” and smuggling in a designer as the simplest answer. To sloppy popular science, it’s a warning against the seduction of “just-so” narratives that make the improbable feel inevitable. Dawkins wants to normalize explanatory labor: long chains of causes, deep time, and iterative processes that don’t fit on a bumper sticker.

Context matters: Dawkins’ broader project, from The Selfish Gene to The Blind Watchmaker, is to show how natural selection converts improbability into apparent inevitability without magic. This line works because it reframes the emotional discomfort we feel when an account gets technical or conditional. If the target is truly complex, you should expect complexity in the explanation. Anything else is comfort literature dressed as insight.