Richard Dawkins
Clinton Richard Dawkins (born March 26, 1941), better known as Richard Dawkins, is a British zoologist, born in Nairobi, in Kenya. He is currently Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford, and is one of the most prominent biologists alive today.
He is probably best known for his popularisation of the "selfish gene" theory (see "Williams Revolution"), described in his book The Selfish Gene. As an ethologist, with a principle interest 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 was the originator of 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 party is often named for Dawkins and the rival party for Stephen Jay Gould. This reflects the pre-eminence of each as a populariser of the contesting view points, 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, Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society and Vice-President of the British Humanist Association. In addition, he writes for the Council for Secular Humanism's magazine Free Inquiry, also serving as a Senior Editor. In his essay "Viruses of the Mind", he interprets religions using the memetics theory.
Dawkins is a prominent figure of contemporary public debate on issues related to science and religion. He topped Prospect Magazines' 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 debate creationists by the rationale that they will just use their proximity to a real scientist to gain legitimacy in the public eye.
See also: Richard Dawkins on Wikiquote.
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, Juliette, 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 Charles Simonyi Professor For The Understanding Of Science at Oxford. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2001.
Selected works
Books
Essays
External links
| Richard Dawkins |
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| Books: The Selfish Gene; - The Extended Phenotype; - The Blind Watchmaker; - River out of Eden; - Climbing Mount Improbable - Unweaving the Rainbow; - A Devil's Chaplain; |
| See also: W. D. Hamilton - Williams revolution - atheism - humanism - evolution - Lalla Ward |