Background and career
Richard Dawkins (born 26 March 1941) is a British evolutionary biologist, zoologist, science communicator, atheist activist, and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford. In 1995 he was named the first Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, a position he held until 2008, and is on the advisory board of the University of Austin. Dawkins has won several academic and writing awards, among them the 2005 Shakespeare Prize and the 2006 Lewis Thomas Prize. Presenting the latter, Paul Nurse said "In eloquent, evocative prose, Richard Dawkins conveys the certainty that, rather than diminishing the myriad beauties of the universe and extinguishing wonderment at its mysteries, science reveals truths that are yet more awe-inspiring than the mysteries they solve." Dubbed "Darwin's rottweiller", Dawkins has written a number of popular books explicating evolution. In The Selfish Gene (1976), he espoused the gene-centred view of evolution and coined the word meme. In The Blind Watchmaker (1986), he explains how the cumulative, non-random process of natural selection, coupled with random variation, creates complexity. In Climbing Mount Improbable (1996), he explores how complex adaptations gradually evolve through a series of intermediates. The book grew out of his Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, Growing Up in the Universe. With Yan Wong, he co-authored The Ancestor's Tale (2004), a "Chaucerian pilgrimage to the dawn of life". He considers The Extended Phenotype (1982) his major contribution to biology. Along with Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, he is known as one of the "Four Horsemen of New Atheism". He made the case for atheism in The God Delusion (2006), which The Sunday Times described as one of the 12 most influential books since the Second World War. That year he founded the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. He edited The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing (2008) and wrote a children's book, The Magic of Reality (2011). He published two collections of essays, Unweaving the Rainbow (1998) and A Devil's Chaplain (2003) and two volumes of memoirs, An Appetite for Wonder (2013) and Brief Candle in the Dark (2015).
Dawkins was born Clinton Richard Dawkins on 26 March 1941 in Nairobi, Colonial Kenya. He later dropped Clinton from his name by deed poll. He is the son of Jean Mary Vyvyan (née Ladner; 1916–2019) and Clinton John Dawkins (1915–2010), an agricultural civil servant in the British Colonial Service in Nyasaland (present-day Malawi), of a landed gentry family from Oxfordshire. His father was called up into the King's African Rifles during the Second World War and returned to England in 1949, when Dawkins was eight. His father had inherited a country estate, Over Norton Park in Oxfordshire, which he farmed commercially. He has a younger sister, Sarah. His parents were interested in natural sciences, and they answered Dawkins's questions in scientific terms. Dawkins describes his childhood as "a normal Anglican upbringing". He embraced Christianity until halfway through his teenage years, at which point he concluded that the theory of evolution alone was a better explanation for life's complexity, and ceased believing in the Christian God. He states: "The main residual reason why I was religious was from being so impressed with the complexity of life and feeling that it had to have a designer, and I think it was when I realised that Darwinism was a far superior explanation that pulled the rug out from under the argument of design. And that left me with nothing". This understanding of atheism, combined with his Western cultural background, influences Dawkins as he describes himself in several interviews as a "cultural Christian" and a "cultural Anglican" in 2007, 2013 and 2024.
On his arrival in England from Nyasaland in 1949, at the age of eight, Dawkins joined Chafyn Grove School in Wiltshire, where he says he was molested by a teacher. From 1954 to 1959 he attended Oundle School in Northamptonshire, an English public school with a Church of England ethos, where he was in Laundimer House. While at Oundle, Dawkins read Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian for the first time. He studied zoology at Balliol College, Oxford (the same college his father attended), graduating in 1962; while there, he was tutored by the Nobel Prize-winning ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen. He graduated with a second-class degree. Dawkins continued as a research student under Tinbergen's supervision, receiving his Doctor of Philosophy (D.Phil.) degree by 1966, and remained a research assistant for another year. Tinbergen was a pioneer in the study of animal behaviour, particularly in the areas of instinct, learning, and choice; Dawkins's research in this period concerned models of animal decision-making.
From 1967 to 1969, Dawkins was an assistant professor of zoology at the University of California, Berkeley. During this period, the students and faculty at UC Berkeley were largely opposed to the ongoing Vietnam War, and Dawkins became involved in the anti-war demonstrations and activities. He returned to the University of Oxford in 1970 as a lecturer. In 1990, he became a reader in zoology. In 1995, he was appointed Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, a position that had been endowed by Charles Simonyi with the express intention that the holder "be expected to make important contributions to the public understanding of some scientific field", and that its first holder should be Richard Dawkins. He held that professorship from 1995 until 2008. Since 1970 he has been a fellow of New College, Oxford, and he is now an emeritus fellow. He has delivered many lectures, including the Henry Sidgwick Memorial Lecture (1989), the first Erasmus Darwin Memorial Lecture (1990), the Michael Faraday Lecture (1991), the T. H. Huxley Memorial Lecture (1992), the Irvine Memorial Lecture (1997), the Sheldon Doyle Lecture (1999), the Tinbergen Lecture (2004), and the Tanner Lectures (2003). He also has edited several journals and has acted as an editorial advisor to the Encarta Encyclopedia and the Encyclopedia of Evolution. He is listed as a senior editor and a columnist of the Council for Secular Humanism's Free Inquiry magazine and has been a member of the editorial board of Skeptic magazine since its foundation. Dawkins has sat on judging panels for awards such as the Royal Society's Faraday Award and the British Academy Television Awards, and has been president of the Biological Sciences section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2004, Balliol College, Oxford, instituted the Dawkins Prize, awarded for "outstanding research into the ecology and behaviour of animals whose welfare and survival may be endangered by human activities". In September 2008 he retired from his professorship, announcing plans to "write a book aimed at youngsters in which he will warn them against believing in 'anti-scientific' fairytales". In 2011 Dawkins joined the professoriate of the New College of the Humanities, a private university in London established by A. C. Grayling, which opened in September 2012. Dawkins announced his final speaking tour would take place in the autumn of 2024.
Dawkins is known for his popularisation of the gene as the principal unit of selection in evolution; this view is most clearly set out in two of his books:
The Selfish Gene (1976), in which he notes that "all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities". The Extended Phenotype (1982), in which he describes natural selection as "the process whereby replicators out-propagate each other". He introduces to a wider audience the influential concept he presented in 1977, that the phenotypic effects of a gene are not necessarily limited to an organism's body, but can stretch far into the environment, including the bodies of other organisms. Dawkins regarded the extended phenotype as his single most important contribution to evolutionary biology and he considered niche construction to be a special case of extended phenotype. The concept of extended phenotype helps explain evolution, but it does not help predict specific outcomes. Dawkins has consistently been sceptical about non-adaptive processes in evolution (such as spandrels, described by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin) and about selection at levels "above" that of the gene. He is particularly sceptical about the practical possibility or importance of group selection as a basis for understanding altruism. Altruism appears at first to be an evolutionary paradox, since helping others costs precious resources and decreases one's own chances for survival, or fitness. Previously, many had interpreted altruism as an aspect of group selection, suggesting that individuals are doing what is best for the survival of the population or species as a whole. The British evolutionary biologist W. D. Hamilton used gene-frequency analysis in his inclusive fitness theory to show how hereditary altruistic traits can evolve if there is sufficient genetic similarity between actors and recipients of such altruism, including close relatives.[a] Hamilton's inclusive fitness has since been successfully applied to a wide range of organisms, including humans. Similarly, the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, thinking in terms of the gene-centred model, developed the theory of reciprocal altruism, whereby one organism provides a benefit to another in the expectation of future reciprocation. Dawkins popularised these ideas in The Selfish Gene, and developed them in later work. Dawkins was highly critical of E. O. Wilson's book The Social Conquest of Earth (2012) as misunderstanding Hamilton's theory of kin selection. Dawkins has also been strongly critical of James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis. Critics of Dawkins's biological approach suggest that taking the gene as the unit of selection (a single event in which an individual either succeeds or fails to reproduce) is misleading. The gene could be better described, they say, as a unit of evolution (the long-term changes in allele frequencies in a population). In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins explains that he is using the biologist George C. Williams's definition of the gene as "that which segregates and recombines with appreciable frequency". Another common objection is that a gene cannot survive alone, but must cooperate with other genes to build an individual, and therefore a gene cannot be an independent "unit". In The Extended Phenotype, Dawkins suggests that from an individual gene's viewpoint, all other genes are part of the environment to which it is adapted. Advocates for higher levels of selection (such as Richard Lewontin, David Sloan Wilson and Elliott Sober) suggest that there are many phenomena (including altruism) that gene-based selection cannot satisfactorily explain. The philosopher Mary Midgley, with whom Dawkins clashed in print concerning The Selfish Gene, has criticised gene selection, memetics and sociobiology as being excessively reductionist; she has suggested that the popularity of Dawkins's work is due to factors in the Zeitgeist such as the increased individualism of the Thatcher/Reagan decades. Besides, other, more recent views and analysis on his popular science works also exist. In a set of controversies over the mechanisms and interpretation of evolution (what has been called 'The Darwin Wars'), one faction is often named after Dawkins, while the other faction is named after the American palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould, reflecting the pre-eminence of each as a populariser of the pertinent ideas. In particular, Dawkins and Gould have been prominent commentators in the controversy over sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, with Dawkins generally approving and Gould generally being critical. A typical example of Dawkins's position is his scathing review of Not in Our Genes by Steven Rose, Leon J. Kamin and Richard C. Lewontin. Two other thinkers who are often considered to be allied with Dawkins on the subject are Steven Pinker and Daniel Dennett; Dennett has promoted a gene-centred view of evolution and defended reductionism in biology. Despite their academic disagreements, Dawkins and Gould did not have a hostile personal relationship, and Dawkins dedicated a large portion of his 2003 book A Devil's Chaplain posthumously to Gould, who had died the previous year. When asked whether Darwinism influences his everyday apprehension of life, Dawkins says, "In one way it does. My eyes are constantly wide open to the extraordinary fact of existence. Not just human existence but the existence of life and how this breathtakingly powerful process, which is natural selection, has managed to take the very simple facts of physics and chemistry and build them up to redwood trees and humans. That's never far from my thoughts, that sense of amazement. On the other hand, I certainly don't allow Darwinism to influence my feelings about human social life", implying that he feels that individual human beings can opt out of the survival machine of Darwinism since they are freed by the consciousness of self. In 1991, he gave the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures on Growing Up in the Universe. This was the seed of Climbing Mount Improbable (1996), an exploration of how complex adaptations gradually evolve through a series of intermediates. With his student Yan Wong, he coauthored The Ancestor's Tale (2004). Based on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, it is structured as a "pilgrimage to the dawn of life," with a band of travelers telling tales that illuminate aspects of biology. He edited The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing (2008), a selection of prose from such scientists as J. B. S. Haldane, G. H. Hardy and Primo Levi. It is divided into "What Scientists Are, What Scientists Study, What Scientists Think, and What Scientists Delight In". He outlined the evidence for evolution in The Greatest Show on Earth (2009), published to coincide with the sesquecentennial of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859). He wrote a children's book on science, The Magic of Reality (2011).
