Time & Perspective Quote by Richard Dawkins

Dawkins pulls off a neat rhetorical judo move: he uses the grand scale of “geological time” to shrink human self-importance down to microbial proportions. The line isn’t just a biology factoid dressed up for cocktail parties; it’s a deliberate attack on the default human story that evolution is a ladder with us at the top. By starting with “our ancestors,” he yokes identity to lineage, then flips the pride of ancestry into something faintly humiliating: bacteria. The point lands because it feels like an insult even while it’s scientifically orthodox.

The subtext is classic Dawkins: anti-exceptionalism with a secular edge. If your mind is reaching for a soul, a special creation, a clean boundary between “us” and “them,” he drags you back to continuity. “Most creatures still are bacteria” is doing cultural work as much as biological work. It reframes the living world as overwhelmingly microbial and treats large animals as the rare, flamboyant afterthoughts.

Then he twists the knife with “each one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria.” Taken literally, that’s contestable in detail (human cells aren’t bacteria), but the provocation is the intent: to force readers to confront that bodies are ecosystems, nested collaborations, compromises with the microscopic. Contextually, it sits in Dawkins’s larger project of demystifying life through evolutionary thinking: wonder without worship, awe without flattering ourselves.