Science Quote by Richard Dawkins

Dawkins isn’t trying to “win” a scientific argument here so much as change the social terms of the argument. By pairing evolution with heliocentrism, he pulls a neat rhetorical trick: he relocates evolution from the category of “controversial idea” to “settled framework,” and frames persistent doubt as a cultural lag rather than a legitimate intellectual position. The line is blunt on purpose. It’s less a lecture than a boundary marker: this is what modern science considers baseline reality; if you’re still arguing, you’re not in a debate, you’re outside the room.

The subtext is directed at two audiences at once. For the scientifically literate, it’s reassurance: you’re not crazy for thinking this is over. For the skeptics (often, in Dawkins’s context, creationists or proponents of “teach the controversy”), it’s a provocation. The comparison to the sun-centered solar system is a historical dunk: society already watched one religiously charged cosmological dispute end with evidence winning and institutions adapting. Dawkins implies the same arc is happening again, and that resistance will age poorly.

Context matters because Dawkins emerged as both evolutionary biologist and public-facing polemicist, especially in late-20th-century fights over science education and “balanced” curricula. He’s defending not just evolution, but the authority of scientific consensus itself: theories aren’t guesses, they’re explanatory engines that survive repeated attempts to break them. The sentence compresses that entire epistemology into a single, pointed act of cultural impatience.