Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins, in full Clinton Richard Dawkins, (born March 26, 1941, Nairobi, Kenya), British evolutionary biologist, ethologist, and popular-science writer who emphasized the gene as the driving force of evolution and generated significant controversy with his enthusiastic advocacy of atheism.

Dawkins spent his early childhood in Kenya, where his father was stationed during World War II. The family returned to England in 1949. In 1959 Dawkins entered Balliol College, University of Oxford, where he received a bachelor’s degree in zoology in 1962. He remained at Oxford, earning his master’s and doctorate degrees in zoology in 1966 under famed ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen. Dawkins assisted Tinbergen before becoming an assistant professor of zoology (1967–69) at the University of California, Berkeley. He returned to Oxford to lecture in zoology in 1970.

In 1976 he published his first book, The Selfish Gene, in which he tried to rectify what he maintained was a widespread misunderstanding of Darwinism. Dawkins argued that natural selection takes place at the genetic rather than the species or individual level, as was often assumed. Genes, he maintained, use the bodies of living things to further their own survival. He also introduced the concept of “memes,” the cultural equivalent of genes. Ideas and concepts, from fashion to music, take on a life of their own within society and, by propagating and mutating from mind to mind, affect the progress of human evolution. Dawkins named the concept after the Greek word mimeme, meaning “to imitate.” It later spawned an entire field of study called memetics. The book was notable not just because of what it espoused but also because of its approachable style, which made it accessible to a popular audience.

More books followed, including The Extended Phenotype (1982), The Blind Watchmaker (1986), which won the Royal Society of Literature Award in 1987, and River Out of Eden (1995). Dawkins particularly sought to address a growing misapprehension of what exactly Darwinian natural selection entailed in Climbing Mount Improbable (1996). Stressing the gradual nature of response to selective pressures, Dawkins took care to point out that intricate structures such as the eye do not manifest randomly but instead successively increase in sophistication. He also released The Evolution of Life (1996), an interactive CD-ROM with which users could create “biomorphs,” computer-simulated examples of evolution first introduced in The Blind Watchmaker.

Dawkins was named the first Charles Simonyi professor of public understanding of science at Oxford (1995–2008). In that capacity he continued to publish prolifically and produced an array of television programs. His 1996 documentary Break the Science Barrier featured Dawkins conversing with an array of prominent scientists about their discoveries. In the volume Unweaving the Rainbow (1998), Dawkins contended that evolutionary theory is aesthetically superior to supernatural explanations of the world. The Ancestor’s Tale (2004), structured after Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, traced the human branch of the phylogenetic tree back to points where it converges with the evolution of other species. Further publications include The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (2009), a tribute to, and vehement defense of, the theory of evolution by natural selection, and The Magic of Reality: How We Know What’s Really True (2011), a book for young readers that juxtaposed the scientific understandings of various phenomena with mythologies that purported to explain them. He also edited The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing (2008).

Though much of Dawkins’s oeuvre generated debate for asserting the supremacy of science over religion in explaining the world, nothing matched the response to the polemical The God Delusion (2006). The book relentlessly points out the logical fallacies in religious belief and ultimately concludes that the laws of probability preclude the existence of an omnipotent creator. Dawkins used the book as a platform to launch the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science (2006), an organization that, in dual American and British incarnations, sought to foster the acceptance of atheism and championed scientific answers to existential questions. Along with fellow atheists Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel C. Dennett, he embarked on a campaign of lectures and public debates proselytizing and defending a secular worldview. Dawkins launched the Out Campaign in 2007 in order to urge atheists to publicly declare their beliefs.

In addition to promoting his organization through its Web site and YouTube channel, Dawkins produced several more television documentaries, variously declaiming the problems created by religion and superstition in Root of All Evil? (2006) and The Enemies of Reason (2007) and celebrating the achievements of Darwin in The Genius of Charles Darwin (2008). Sex, Death, and the Meaning of Life (2012) explores the implications of living without religious faith. In the memoir An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist (2013), Dawkins chronicled his life up to the publication of The Selfish Gene. A second volume of memoir, Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science (2015), recorded episodes from the latter part of his career.

Dawkins was named a fellow of the Royal Society in 2001.