Richard Dawkins

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Clinton Richard Dawkins, FRS (born March 26, 1941), better known as Richard Dawkins, is a British zoologist, born in Nairobi, in Kenya. He currently holds the position of Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford, and is one of the most prominent biologists alive.

He is probably best known for his popularisation of the concept of the selfish gene (see "Williams Revolution"), described in his book The Selfish Gene. As an ethologist, interested in animal behaviour and its relation to natural selection, he popularised the idea that the gene is the principal unit of selection in evolution. This gene point of view also provides a basis for understanding kin selection which was originally suggested by J. B. S. Haldane and expanded by W. D. Hamilton.

Dawkins has been one of the major proponents of sociobiological theory and coined the term meme, which spawned the theory of memetics. In the controversy over the interpretation of the theory of evolution that is colloquially called the Darwin Wars, one faction is often named for Dawkins and its rival for Stephen Jay Gould. This reflects the pre-eminence of each as popularisers of the contesting viewpoints, rather than because either is the more substantial or extreme champion of these positions. Dawkins acquiesced in this role from the time of his scathing review (published in January 1985) of Not in Our Genes! by Rose, Kamin and Lewontin.

He is an ardent and outspoken atheist, an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society and vice-president of the British Humanist Association. He also writes for the Council for Secular Humanism's magazine Free Inquiry and serves as a Senior Editor. In his essay "Viruses of the Mind", he uses memetics theory to explain the phenomenon of religious belief and the various characteristics of organised religions, such as the punishments awaiting non-believers.

Dawkins is a prominent figure in contemporary public debate on issues related to science and religion. He topped Prospect Magazine's 2004 list of the top 100 public British intellectuals, as decided by the readers, receiving twice as many votes as the runner-up. [1]

On the advice of his late colleague Stephen Jay Gould, Dawkins refuses to participate in debates with creationists on the basis that they will just use their proximity to a real scientist to gain legitimacy in the public eye.

Biographical information

Dawkins comes from an upper-middle class family which can be found in the pages of Burke's Landed Gentry as "Dawkins of Over Norton". His father, John Clinton Dawkins, was a descendant of the Clinton family which held the Earldom of Lincoln. His mother was Jean Mary Vyvyan Dawkins (née Ladner).

He received a second class BA degree in zoology from Balliol College, Oxford in 1962, where he studied under the Dutch ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen. This was followed by an MA and DPhil in 1966.

He married Marian Stamp on August 19, 1967, but they divorced in 1984. On June 1 the same year, Dawkins married Eve Barham, by whom he had a daughter, Juliet, but they, too, divorced. He married his third wife, former actor Lalla Ward, in 1992, after having been introduced to her by Douglas Adams (who was a colleague of hers on the production team of Dr Who; Dawkins and Adams had quickly become friends after he had written a fan letter to Adams).

Meanwhile, he was an assistant professor of zoology at University of California, Berkeley, between 1967 and 1969. He was lecturer in zoology at Oxford University, and fellow of New College, from 1970 to 1990, and later a reader in zoology, until 1995, when he became the first Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2001.

Selected works

Books

• The Selfish Gene (1976; second edition, 1989)
• The Extended Phenotype (1982)
• The Blind Watchmaker (1986)
• River Out Of Eden (1995)
• Climbing Mount Improbable (1996)
• Unweaving the Rainbow (1998)
• A Devil's Chaplain (selected essays, 2003)
• The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life (2004)

Essays

• Viruses of the Mind (1993)
• The real romance in the stars - A critical view of astrology (1995)
• Race and creation - On race, its usage and a theory of how it evolved. (October 2004)
• What Use is Religion? - Piece by Dawkins on SecularHumanism.org

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations by or about Richard Dawkins.

• Richard Dawkins' homepage at Oxford University (very sparse)
• Dawkins' page at the Charles Simonyi Chair in the Public Understanding of Science
• Extensive website on Dawkins, no longer updated
  • Full bibliography
• Slate interview, 1 Dec 2004

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