Science Quote by Richard Dawkins

Dawkins isn’t just staking out a scientific position here; he’s drawing a boundary line around what counts as an admissible explanation for life’s intricate machinery. The phrase “organized complexity” is doing heavy lifting. It nods to a recurring temptation in public debate: to treat biological complexity as self-authenticating evidence of design, purpose, or some special exemption from ordinary causality. Dawkins turns that around. Complexity, he implies, is not a miracle to be explained away with awe; it’s precisely the kind of phenomenon that demands a mechanism with teeth.

The key rhetorical move is “in principle capable.” He’s not claiming evolutionary theory has already mapped every pathway from chemistry to consciousness. He’s asserting something more foundational: among proposed explanations, cumulative natural selection is uniquely structured to build improbable order without smuggling in an intelligence that itself would require explanation. “Cumulative” is the quiet dagger. It rejects the straw-man caricature of evolution as a one-shot accident, replacing it with a ratchet: small, non-randomly retained improvements stacked across vast time.

Context matters: Dawkins wrote and spoke in a cultural atmosphere where evolution wasn’t merely a biological theory but a proxy war over authority - scientific, religious, educational. The sentence is calibrated for that battlefield. It carries a subtextual challenge: if you want to compete with this account, don’t offer vibes, metaphors, or reverent gestures toward mystery. Offer a process that can actually generate complexity step by step, without borrowing the very complexity you’re trying to explain.