The Magic of Reality by Richard Dawkins

• Reality is everything that exists.
• Reality doesn’t just consist of the things we already know about: it also includes things that exist but that we don’t know about yet--and won’t know about until some future time, perhaps when we have built better instruments to assist our five senses.
• We should always be open-minded, but the only good reason to believe that something exists is if there is real evidence that it does.
• We come to know what is real, then, in one of three days. We can detect it directly, using our five senses; or indirectly, using our senses aided by special instruments such as telescopes and microscopes; or even more indirectly, by creating models to see whether they successfully predict things that we can see with or without the aid of instruments. Ultimately, it always comes back to our senses, one way or another.
• Magic is a slippery word: it is commonly used in three different ways, and the first thing I must do is distinguish between them. I’ll call the first one ‘supernatural magic’, the second one ‘stage magic’ and the third one ‘poetic magic’.
• Supernatural magic is the kind of magic we find in myths and fairy tales.
• Stage magic, by contrast, really does happen, and it can be great fun. Or at least, something really happens, though it isn’t what the audience think it is.
• The third meaning of magic is the one I mean in my title: poetic magic. [...] In this sense, ‘magical’ simply means deeply moving, exhilarating: something that gives us goosebumps, something that makes us feel more fully alive.
• To claim a supernatural explanation of something is not to explain it at all and, even worse, to rule out any possibility of its every being explained.
• [...] The scientific method has been responsible for the huge advances in knowledge we have enjoyed over the last 400 years or so.
• To say something happened supernaturally is not just to say ‘We don’t understand it’ but to say ‘We will never understand it, so don’t even try’.
• If something were to happen that went against our current understanding of reality, scientists would see that as a challenge to our present model, requiring us to abandon or at least change it. It is through such adjustments and subsequent testing that we approach closer and closer to what is true.
• The whole history of science shows us that things once thought to be the result of the supernatural--caused by gods, demons, witches, spirits, curses and spells--actually do have natural explanations: explanations that we can understand and test and have confidence in.
• There is absolutely no reason to believe that horse hints for which science does not yet have natural explanations will turn out to be of supernatural origin, any more than volcanoes or earthquakes or diseases turn out to be causes by agry deities, as people once believed they were.
• Complex organisms--like humans, crocodiles, and brussels sprouts--did not come about suddenly, in one fell swoop, but gradually, step by tiny step, so that what was there after each step was only a little bit different from what was already there before.
• Simply by choosing which frogs breed and which do not, we can make a new kind of frog.
• The magic of reality is neither supernatural nor a trick, but--quite simply--wonderful. Wonderful, and real. Wonderful because real.
• Stories are fun, and we all love repeating them. But when we hear a colorful story, whether it is an ancient myth or a modern ‘urban legend’ whizzing around the internet, it is also worth stopping to ask whether it--or any part of it--is true.
• This may surprise you, but there never was a first person--because every person had to have parents, and those parents had to be people too.
• A thought experiment is an experiment in your imagination.
• Your 195-million-greats-grandfather was a fish.
• Fossils are made of stone. They are stones that have picked up the shapes of dead animals or plants. The great majority of animals die with no hope of turning into a fossil. The trick, if you want to be a fossil, is to get yourself buried in the right kind of mud or silt, the kind that might eventually harden to form ‘sedimentary rock’.
• DNA is the genetic information that all living creatures carry in each of their cells. The DNA is spelled out along massively coiled ‘tapes’ of data, called ‘chromosomes’. These chromosomes really are very like the kind of data tapes you’d feed into an old-fashioned computer, because the information they carry is digital and is strung along them in order.
• All genes, in every animal, plant and bacterium that has ever been looked at, are coded messages for how to build the creature, written in a standard alphabet.
• What is a fact beyond all doubt is that wef share an ancestor with every other species of animal and plant on the planet. We know this becomes some genres are recognizably the same genes in all living creatures, including animals, plants and bacteria.
• Animals belong to different species if they don’t breed together.
• In every generation, sexual reproduction sees to it that genes are shuffled.
• Natural selection nudges evolution in a purposeful direction: namely, the direction of survival.
• A scientific model is a way of thinking about how things might be.
• Scientists don’t stop at proposing a model: they then go on to test it.
• A successful model is one whose predictions came out right, especially if they survive the test of experiment. And if the predictions come out right, we hope it means that the model probably represents the truth, or at least a part of the truth.
• Many myths and legends from all around the world have the same odd feature: a particular incident happens once, and then, for reasons never explained, the same thing goes on happening again and again forever.
• For what it is worth, the Earth is actually closest to the sun (perihelion) in January and furthest (aphelion) in July, but the elliptical orbit is so close to circular that it makes no noticeable difference.
• The sun is  a star. It’s no different from lots of other stars, except that we happen to be near it so it looks much bigger and brighter than the others.
• The larger any object is, the stronger the gravitational pull towards its center. Everything pulls everything by gravity.
• According to the modern version of the big bang model, the entire observable universe exploded into existence between 13 and 14 billion years ago.
• The ‘observable universe’ means everything for which we have any evidence at all. It is possible that there are other universes that are inaccessible to all our sense and instruments.
• No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish.
• If something happens that appears to be unexplainable by science, you can safely conclude one of two things. Either it didn’t really happen (the observer was mistaken, or was lying, or was tricked); or we have exposed a shortcoming in present-day science. If present-day science encounters an observation, or an experimental result, that it cannot explain, then we should not rest until we have improved our science so that it can provide an explanation.