Background

Richard Dawkins was born on March 26, 1941, in Nairobi, Kenya as Clinton Richard Dawkins. He is a son of Jean Mary Vyvyan and Clinton John Dawkins. Dawkins spent his early childhood in Kenya, where his father was stationed during World War II. The family returned to England in 1949. Both 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".

Education

From 1954 to 1959 Dawkins attended Oundle School in Northamptonshire, an English public school with a distinct Church of England flavour, where he was in Laundimer house. In 1959 Dawkins entered Balliol College, University of Oxford, where he obtained a bachelor’s degree in zoology in 1962. He remained at Oxford, earning his master’s and doctorate degrees in zoology by 1966 under famed ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen.

Career

Richard 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.

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.

Achievements

• In his scientific work, Dawkins is mostly known for his gene-centered reformulation of Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection. In his book, The Selfish Gene (1976), he argues that it is not groups or organisms that adapt and evolve, but individual genes.
  
  Dawkins was awarded a Doctor of Science degree by the University of Oxford in 1989. He holds honorary doctorates in science from the University of Huddersfield, University of Westminster, Durham University, the University of Hull, the University of Antwerp, the University of Oslo, the University of Aberdeen, Open University, the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and the University of Valencia. He also holds honorary doctorates of letters from the University of St Andrews and the Australian National University (HonLittD, 1996), and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1997 and a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2001. He is one of the patrons of the Oxford University Scientific Society.
  
  Dawkins 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. He was shortlisted as a candidate in their 2008 follow-up poll. In a poll held by Prospect in 2013, Dawkins was voted the world's top thinker based on 65 names chosen by a largely US and UK-based expert panel.
  
  In 2007, Richard was listed by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2007, and was ranked 20th in The Daily Telegraph's 2007 list of 100 greatest living geniuses.
  
  In 2012, ichthyologists in Sri Lanka honored Dawkins by creating Dawkinsia as a new genus name (members of this genus were formerly members of the genus Puntius).

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Greatest Show on Earth

    (In this book, Dawkins sifts through rich layers of scient...)

    2009
  • Unweaving the Rainbow

    (Did Newton “unweave the rainbow” by reducing it to its pr...)

    1998
  • Science in the Soul

    (The legendary biologist, provocateur, and best-selling au...)

    2017
  • River Out of Eden

    (How did the replication bomb we call ”life” begin and whe...)

    1995
  • The God Delusion

    (A preeminent scientist - and the world's most prominent a...)

    2006
  • An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist

    (In An Appetite for Wonder, Richard Dawkins shares a rare ...)

    2013
  • Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science

    (Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science by Richard D...)

    2015
  • The Magic of Reality

    (Richard Dawkins, bestselling author and the world’s most ...)

    2011
  • A Devil's Chaplain

    (Essays on morality, mortality, and much more from the New...)

    2003
  • The Extended Phenotype

    (In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins crystallized the gen...)

    1982
  • The Blind Watchmaker

    (The Blind Watchmaker is the seminal text for understandin...)

    1986
  • The Selfish Gene

    (The Selfish Gene is a classic exposition of evolutionary ...)

    1976
  • The Ancestor's Tale 2004

• movie

  • The Unbelievers: Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Woody Allen

    (The Unbelievers follows renowned scientists Richard Dawki...)

    2013
  • Watch Sex, Death And The Meaning Of Life

    (Richard Dawkins explores ideas about the soul, the afterl...)

    2012
  • Watch Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

    (Big science has expelled smart ideas from the classroom.....)

    2008
  • Richard Dawkins: Growing Up in the Universe 1991
  • Break the Science Barrier 1996
  • Atheism Tapes 2004
  • Root of All Evil 2006
  • The Enemies of Reason 2007
  • The Genius of Charles Darwin 2008

Religion

Dawkins was confirmed into the Church of England at the age of 13, but began to grow sceptical of the beliefs. After learning about Darwinism and the scientific reason why living things look as though they have been designed, Dawkins lost the remainder of his religious faith. Now he is a noted critic of religion, atheist, anti-theist, anti-religionist, and a secular humanist.

On his spectrum of theistic probability, which has seven levels between 1 (100% certainty that a God or gods exist) and 7 (100% certainty that a God or gods do not exist), Dawkins has said he is a 6.9, which represents a "de facto atheist" who thinks "I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there." When asked about his slight uncertainty, Dawkins quips, "I am agnostic to the extent that I am agnostic about fairies at the bottom of the garden." In May 2014, at the Hay Festival in Wales, Dawkins explained that while he does not believe in the supernatural elements of the Christian faith, he still has nostalgia for the ceremonial side of religion. In addition to beliefs in deities, Dawkins has criticized other irrational religious beliefs such as Jesus turned water into wine, that an embryo starts as a blob, that magic underwear will protect you, that Jesus was resurrected, that semen comes from the spine, that Jesus walked on water, that the sun sets in a marsh, that the Garden of Eden existed in Missouri, that Jesus' mother was a virgin, that Muhammad split the moon, and that Lazarus was raised from the dead.

Dawkins has risen to prominence in public debates concerning science and religion since the publication of his most popular book, The God Delusion, in 2006, which became an international best seller. As of 2015, more than three million copies have been sold and the book has been translated into over 30 languages. Its success has been seen by many as indicative of a change in the contemporary cultural zeitgeist and has also been identified with the rise of New Atheism. In the book, Dawkins contends that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that religious faith is a delusion - "a fixed false belief". In his February 2002 TED talk entitled "Militant atheism", Dawkins urged all atheists to openly state their position and to fight the incursion of the church into politics and science. On 30 September 2007, Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett met at Hitchens's residence for a private, unmoderated discussion that lasted two hours. The event was videotaped and entitled "The Four Horsemen". Dawkins launched the Out Campaign in 2007 in order to urge atheists to publicly declare their beliefs.

Politics

Before the mid-2000s, Dawkins usually voted for Labour Party candidates. The party has often been described as social democratic. Starting in the mid-2000s, Dawkins has also voted and expressed support for the Liberal Democrats. Dawkins spoke at the party's conference in 2009 and publicly expressed his support then. At the conference, Dawkins strongly criticized the English libel laws, and the party revised its policy on the issue at the same conference. Dawkins also called for an alliance of all Liberal Democrats based on an agreement on electoral reform.

Dawkins has voiced his support for the Campaign for the Establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, an organization that campaigns for democratic reform in the United Nations, and the creation of a more accountable international political system.

Dawkins was opposed to the Iraq War. "Well what I really objected to was the lying about the motives for going into Iraq…it was an act of political opportunism." However, Dawkins supported the Afghan War. "I felt that America needed to try and find those responsible [for 9/11], and it did really appear as though Al-Qaeda was being actively encouraged by the Taliban regime in Afghanistan."

Views

Richard Dawkins is best known for his popularisation of the gene as the principal unit of selection in evolution; this view is most clearly set out in his books.

Dawkins has consistently been skeptical about non-adaptive processes in evolution (such as spandrels, described by Gould and 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. This behavior appears at first to be an evolutionary paradox, since helping others costs precious resources and decreases one's own fitness.

Previously, many had interpreted this as an aspect of group selection: individuals are doing what is best for the survival of the population or species as a whole. 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). Hamilton's inclusive fitness has since been successfully applied to a wide range of organisms, including humans. Similarly, 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 his own work. In June 2012, Dawkins was highly critical of fellow biologist E. O. Wilson's 2012 book The Social Conquest of Earth as misunderstanding Hamilton's theory of kin selection. Dawkins has also been strongly critical of the Gaia hypothesis of the independent scientist James Lovelock.

In his role as a professor for public understanding of science, Dawkins has been a critic of pseudoscience and alternative medicine. His 1998 book Unweaving the Rainbow considers John Keats's accusation that by explaining the rainbow, Isaac Newton diminished its beauty; Dawkins argues for the opposite conclusion. He suggests that deep space, the billions of years of life's evolution, and the microscopic workings of biology and heredity contain more beauty and wonder than do "myths" and "pseudoscience".

Dawkins has expressed concern about the growth of human population and about the matter of overpopulation. In The Selfish Gene, he briefly mentions population growth, giving the example of Latin America, whose population, at the time the book was written, was doubling every 40 years. He is critical of Roman Catholic attitudes to family planning and population control, stating that leaders who forbid contraception and "express a preference for 'natural' methods of population limitation" will get just such a method in the form of starvation.

Dawkins is a supporter of animal rights. He has stated that he believes many kinds of animals have consciousness. "Consciousness has to be there, hasn't it? It's an evolved, emergent quality of brains. It's very likely that most mammals have consciousness, and probably birds, too." Dawkins has also been a major supporter of the Great Ape Project, a coalition of scientists and others who believe that non-human great apes should have the rights to life, the protection of individual liberty, and the prohibition of torture. As a supporter of the Great Ape Project - a movement to extend certain moral and legal rights to all great apes - Dawkins contributed the article 'Gaps in the Mind' to the Great Ape Project book edited by Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer. In this essay, he criticizes contemporary society's moral attitudes as being based on a "discontinuous, speciesist imperative".

Dawkins identifies as a feminist. Dawkins has said that feminism is "enormously important" and "a political movement that deserves to be supported".

Richard Dawkins strongly argues for a genetic basis for homosexuality and postulates that the gene was preserved through various social and cultural processes. Dawkins has also stated that homosexuality does not conflict with the evolutionary principle. In a talk at Kennesaw State University, he said that "[Evolution] is the explanation for why we exist. It is not something to guide our lives in our own society. […] What we need is a truly anti-Darwinian society - anti-Darwinian in the sense that we do not wish to live in a society where…the strongest suppress the weak…I want to live in a society where we take care of the sick, take care of the weak, take care of the oppressed."

Quotations: "It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that)."

"The fact that life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved out of literally nothing, is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice."

"What I can’t understand is why you can’t see the extraordinary beauty of the idea that life started from nothing – that is such a staggering, elegant, beautiful thing, why would you want to clutter it up with something so messy as a God?”

"I'm not clever enough to be a physicist."

"I’m all for offending people’s religion. I think it should be offended at every opportunity."

"The evolution of the capacity to simulate seems to have culminated in subjective consciousness. Why this should have happened is, to me, the most profound mystery facing modern biology."

"Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist."

"Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not."

"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born."

"[If] there is mercy in nature, it is accidental. Nature is neither kind nor cruel but indifferent."

"Pantheism is sexed-up atheism. Deism is watered-down theism."

"The first cause cannot have been an intelligence, let alone an intelligence that answers prayers and enjoys being worshiped."

"Science is the poetry of reality."

"With respect to those meanings of "human" that are relevant to the morality of abortion, any fetus is less human than an adult pig."

Personality

Dawkins is always indefatigably active. He rarely takes a holiday but travels frequently to give talks. Though he says he prefers to speak about science, God inevitably looms. Dawkins describes himself as “a communicator”. For some, his controversial positions have started to undermine both his reputation as a scientist and his own anti-religious crusade. Friends who vigorously defend both his cause and his character worry that Dawkins might be at risk of self-sabotage. “He could be seriously damaging his long-term legacy,” the philosopher Daniel Dennett said of Dawkins’s public skirmishes. It is a legacy, Dennett believes, that should reflect the “masterpiece” that was The Selfish Gene and Dawkins’s major contribution to our understanding of life. As for Twitter: “I wish he wouldn’t do it,” Krauss said. “I told him that.”

In person, Dawkins subverts his reputation for stridency. He is reticent to the point of awkwardness, always scrupulously courteous. (Blumner described how every time they traveled together, he insisted on picking up her luggage from the carousel: “I call him my celebrity valet.”) His interests are broad: music, theatre, poetry. His favourite poets – Betjeman, AE Housman, Yeats – regularly make him cry. “I don’t cry over somebody dying,” he said. “But I cry over a beautifully turned phrase.”

Physical Characteristics: On 6 February 2016, Dawkins suffered a minor hemorrhagic stroke while at home. Dawkins reported later that same year that he had almost completely recovered.

Quotes from others about the person

• "Dawkins is a master of setting up a straw man, then dismantling it with great relish. In fact, it is hard to escape the conclusion that such repeated mischaracterizations of faith betray a vitriolic personal agenda, rather than a reliance on rational arguments that Dawkins so cherishes in the scientific realm." - Francis Collins
  
  "Richard Dawkins is quite simply incomparable. No one can make science so exciting, so interesting, or so clear... If only Stephen Hawking had a tenth of his clarity." - Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy
  
  "Dawkins is a brilliant writer and speaker on science. His grasp of the subject and his use of vivid analogies can explain scientific concepts and make them clear even for the non-scientist..." - Richard Harries
  
  "What Dawkins does too often is to concentrate his attack on fundamentalists. But there are many believers who are just not fundamentalists. Fundamentalism is another problem. I mean, Dawkins in a way is almost a fundamentalist himself, of another kind." - Peter Higgs
  
  "People like Dawkins are the public face of atheism. And that public face is one that is defensively and irrationally sexist. It's not only turning women away from atheism, it's discrediting the idea that atheists are actually people who argue from a position of rationality. How can they be, when they cling to the ancient, irrational tradition of treating women like they aren't quite as human as men?" - Amanda Marcotte
  
  "The God that Dawkins does not believe in is "a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully." Come to think of it, I don't believe in a God like that either. In fact, I don't know anybody who does. Dawkins at least has the graciousness to appreciate this point. The God whom I know and love is described by Dawkins as “insipid,” summed up in the “mawkishly nauseating” idea of “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild.” While some readers will take offense at this description, it is probably the mildest criticism of religion offered anywhere in his book." - Alister McGrath

Interests

• music, theatre, poetry

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Charles Robert Darwin

• Writers

  Betjeman, A.E. Housman, W. B. Yeats

• Music & Bands

  Franz Schubert

Connections

Dawkins has been married three times and has one daughter. On 19 August 1967, Dawkins married fellow ethologist Marian Stamp in the Protestant church in Annestown, County Waterford, Ireland; they divorced in 1984. On 1 June 1984, he married Eve Barham (19 August 1951 – 28 February 1999) in Oxford. They had a daughter, Juliet Emma Dawkins (born 1984, Oxford). Dawkins and Barham divorced. In 1992, he married actress Lalla Ward in Kensington and Chelsea, London. Dawkins met her through their mutual friend Douglas Adams, who had worked with her on the BBC's Doctor Who. Dawkins and Ward separated in 2016 and they later described the separation as "entirely amicable".

Father:

Clinton John Dawkins

Mother:

Jean Mary Vyvyan Dawkins

ex-wife:

Marian Stamp

Marian Stamp Dawkins is a British biologist and professor of ethology at the University of Oxford. Her research interests include vision in birds, animal signaling, behavioral synchrony, animal consciousness, and animal welfare.

ex-wife:

Eve Barham

ex-wife:

Lalla Ward

Daughter:

Juliet Emma Dawkins

Friend:

Douglas Adams

Douglas Noel Adams was an English author, scriptwriter, essayist, humorist, satirist, and dramatist.

Friend:

Lawrence Maxwell Krauss

Lawrence Maxwell Krauss (born 1954) is an American-Canadian theoretical physicist and cosmologist.

Doctoral advisor:

Nikolaas Tinbergen

Richard Dawkins was tutored by Nobel Prize-winning ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen.

References

• Dawkins vs. Gould: Survival of the Fittest
  2007
• Richard Dawkins: How a scientist changed the way we think
  2006