Science Quote by Kary Mullis

Mullis is doing what he often did in public: picking a fight with the cultural authority that expects deference. By calling religion "inwardly focused" and "driven only to sustain itself", he’s not merely rejecting religious truth claims; he’s reframing religion as an organism with survival instincts. The line borrows the cold clarity of systems thinking: institutions, like species, adapt to persist. The sting is that he strips away religion’s stated ends (salvation, moral formation, transcendence) and replaces them with a single, unflattering motive: self-preservation.

The specific intent reads as a scientist’s provocation, an attempt to puncture the idea that religion is primarily outward-facing service. It’s also a defensive move on behalf of scientific authority. If religion’s core drive is institutional continuity, then its clashes with science aren’t tragic misunderstandings; they’re predictable immune responses to threats. That’s the subtext: religion doesn’t argue because it’s right, it argues because it must.

Context matters because Mullis wasn’t a cautious institutional scientist; he was a Nobel-winning iconoclast who enjoyed needling consensus. That biography makes the quote feel less like a neutral sociological claim and more like a polemical one-liner, optimized for maximum abrasion. Its rhetorical power comes from reduction: it’s hard to disprove in a single sitting, because any counterexample can be dismissed as part of the survival strategy. The weakness is the same as its strength: religion becomes a monolith, and believers become functionaries of a system, not moral agents with complex reasons.