Education Quote by Richard Dawkins

Dawkins lands a provocation by smuggling a moral agenda through a brutally unsentimental view of human nature. “Let us try” is doing quiet rhetorical work: it lowers the temperature, inviting the reader into a practical project rather than a sermon. But the core claim is sharp-edged: if we are “born selfish,” then goodness is not a natural overflow of purity; it is an achievement, a kind of cultural engineering.

The line sits in the shadow of Dawkins’s larger project in The Selfish Gene: evolution selects for gene survival, not for kindness in the Hallmark sense. The subtext isn’t “people are bad,” but “nature is indifferent.” In that framework, altruism becomes something you have to build against default settings, like teaching literacy to brains that didn’t evolve for novels. He’s pushing back on the comforting Victorian idea that morality is proof of our specialness; instead, morality is evidence of our capacity to override impulse with norms, institutions, and reflection.

There’s also a strategic reframing here for a scientist often caricatured as reducing humans to biology. Dawkins concedes the force of evolutionary self-interest, then uses it to justify ethics rather than dismiss them. Teaching generosity becomes a civic technology: parenting, schooling, social rituals, even policy, all aimed at expanding the circle of concern beyond kin and tribe.

The bite is that it flatters no one. If altruism is learned, it can also be unlearned. The quote reads as both hope and warning: decency is fragile, and maintaining it is work.