British zoologist, born in Nairobi, Kenya. His family returned to England in 1949, where he studied zoology at Oxford. He taught at the University of California, Berkeley (196770) then returned to Oxford. His work on animal behaviour and genetics emphasizes that apparently selfish behaviour is designed to ensure survival of the gene, apparently above that of the carrier (The Selfish Gene, 1976), and this and wider views on behaviour and evolution have been developed in The Blind Watchmaker (1986), River out of Eden (1995), Climbing Mount Improbable (1996), and The Ancestor's Tale (2004). The God Delusion appeared in 2006. He introduced the concept of a cultural analogue of the gene, the meme, to capture the notion that some ideas seem to take on a life of their own within society, even affecting the course of evolution. One of the most successful popularizers of his subject, he became Charles Simonyi professor of public understanding of science at Oxford in 1995. He remains a controversial media figure, known as much for his aggressive atheism as for his scientific views on evolution.
Richard Dawkins|
Richard Dawkins in March, 2005. |
|
| Born |
March 26, 1941 Nairobi, Kenya |
|---|---|
| Residence | UK |
| Nationality | British |
| Field | Evolutionary biology |
| Institution | Oxford University |
| Doctoral Advisor | Niko Tinbergen |
| Notable Prizes | Zoological Society of London Silver Medal (1989), Faraday Award (1990), Kistler Prize (2001) |
Clinton Richard Dawkins (born March 26, 1941) is an eminent British ethologist, evolutionary scientist, and popular science writer who holds the Charles Simonyi Chair in the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University.
Dawkins first came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene which popularised the gene-centric view of evolution and introduced the term meme into the lexicon, thereby helping to found the field of memetics.
Dawkins is an outspoken atheist, humanist, and sceptic, and is a prominent member of the Brights movement.
Personal life
Dawkins was born in Nairobi, Kenya. His father, Clinton John Dawkins, was a farmer and former wartime soldier called up from colonial service in Nyasaland (now Malawi). Dawkins' parents came from an affluent upper-middle class background – the Dawkins name was described in Burke's Landed Gentry as "Dawkins of Over Norton". His father was a descendant of the Clinton family which held the Earldom of Lincoln, and his mother was Jean Mary Vyvyan Dawkins, née Ladner.
Dawkins describes his childhood as "a normal Anglican upbringing", but reveals that he began doubting the existence of God when he was about nine years old. Later that year, Dawkins married Eve Barham – with whom he had a daughter, Juliet – but they too subsequently divorced. Dawkins had met her through their mutual friend Douglas Adams, who worked with Ward on the BBC TV sci-fi series Doctor Who.
Career
Dawkins moved to England with his parents at the age of eight, and attended Oundle School.
Between 1967 and 1969, Dawkins was an assistant professor of zoology at the University of California, Berkeley.
Dawkins has edited a number of journals and has acted as editorial advisor for several publications, including Encarta Encyclopedia and the Encyclopedia of Evolution. In 2004 the Dawkins Prize – awarded for "outstanding research into the ecology and behaviour of animals whose welfare and survival may be endangered by human activities" – was initiated by Oxford's Balliol College.
In 1996, Charles Simonyi referred to Dawkins as "Darwin's rottweiler", a description later adopted by Discover magazine, the Radio Times and Channel 4.
Work
Evolutionary biology
In his scientific works, Dawkins is best known for his popularisation of the gene-centered view of evolution – a view most clearly set out in his books The Selfish Gene (1976), where he notes that "all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities", and The Extended Phenotype (1982), in which he describes natural selection as "the process whereby replicators out-propagate each other".
In his books, Dawkins uses the imagery of the Necker Cube to explain that the gene-centered view is not a scientific revolution, but merely a new way of visualising evolution. Dawkins argues that the gene-centered view is a useful model of evolution for some purposes, but that evolution can still be understood and studied in terms of individuals and populations.
The gene-centered view also provides a basis for understanding altruism. following Hamilton's death in 2000 Dawkins wrote his obituary and organised a secular memorial service.) Similarly, Robert Trivers, thinking in terms of the gene-centered model, developed the theory of reciprocal altruism, where one organism provides a benefit to another in the expectation of future reciprocation.
Critics of Dawkins' approach suggest that taking the gene as the unit of selection is misleading, but that the gene could be described as a unit of evolution. In The Selfish Gene, however, Dawkins explains that he is using George C. Similarly, it is commonly argued that genes can not survive alone, but must cooperate to build an individual, but in The Extended Phenotype, Dawkins argues that because of genetic recombination and sexual reproduction, from an individual gene's viewpoint, all other genes are part of the environment to which it is adapted. These sections are the "genes" to which Dawkins and Williams refer.
In the controversy over interpretations of evolution (the so-called Darwin Wars), one faction is often named for Dawkins and its rival for Stephen Jay Gould. In particular, Dawkins and Gould have been prominent commentators in the controversy over sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, with Dawkins generally approving and Gould critical. Two other thinkers often considered to be in the same camp as Dawkins are the evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, and the philosopher Daniel Dennett who has promoted the gene-centric view of evolution and defended reductionism in biology.
Memetics
Dawkins coined the term meme (analogous to the gene) to describe how Darwinian principles might be extended to explain the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena, which spawned the theory of memetics. While originally floating the idea in The Selfish Gene, Dawkins has largely left it to other authors, such as Susan Blackmore, to expand upon it. Memetics, gene selection, and sociobiology have been criticised as being overly-reductionist by such thinkers as the philosopher Mary Midgley, with whom Dawkins has debated since the late 1970s. Among other exchanges, Midgley stated that to debate Dawkins would be as unnecessary as to "break a butterfly upon a wheel". Dawkins replied that this statement would be "hard to match, in reputable journals, for its patronizing condescension toward a fellow academic".
Although Dawkins coined the term independently, he has never claimed that the idea of the meme was new – there had been similar terms for similar ideas in the past. His book discussed the cultural transmission of experiences, with insights parallel to those of Dawkins.
Creationism
Dawkins is a critic of creationism, describing it as a "preposterous, mind-shrinking falsehood". On the advice of his late colleague Stephen Jay Gould, Dawkins generally refuses to participate in debates with creationists because doing so would give them the "oxygen of respectability" that they want. Dawkins did, however, take part in the Oxford Union's 1986 Huxley Memorial Debate, in which he and John Maynard Smith defeated their creationist counterparts.
In a December 2004 interview with Bill Moyers, Dawkins stated that "among the things that science does know, evolution is about as certain as anything we know." When Moyers later asked, "Is evolution a theory, not a fact?", Dawkins replied, "Evolution has been observed. Dawkins went on to say, "It is rather like a detective coming on a murder after the scene.
Religion
Dawkins is an ardent and outspoken atheist, an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society, vice-president of the British Humanist Association and a Distinguished Supporter of the Humanist Society of Scotland. In 2003, The Atheist Alliance International instituted the Richard Dawkins Award in his honour. Dawkins is well known for his contempt for religious extremism, from Islamic terrorism to Christian fundamentalism, but he has also argued fiercely with liberal believers and religious scientists, including many who might otherwise champion his science and fight creationism alongside him, from the biologist Kenneth Miller to the former Bishop of Oxford, Richard Harries.
Dawkins continues to be a prominent figure in contemporary public debate on issues relating to science and religion. Dawkins notes that feminists have succeeded in making us feel embarrassed when we routinely employ "he" instead of "she". Following the September 11, 2001 attacks, when asked how the world might have changed, Dawkins responded:
In January 2006, Dawkins presented a two-part Channel 4 documentary entitled (against his wishes) The Root of All Evil?, addressing what he sees as the malignant influence of organised religion in society. Dawkins rejected these claims, citing the number of moderate religious broadcasts in everyday media as providing a suitable balance to the extremists in the programmes.
Oxford theologian Alister McGrath, author of Dawkins' God: Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of Life, has accused Dawkins of being ignorant of Christian theology and mischaracterising religious people generally. McGrath asserts that Dawkins has become better known for his rhetoric than for his reasoning, and that there is no clear basis for Dawkins' hostility towards religion. In response Dawkins states that his position is that Christian theology is vacuous, and that the only area of theology which might command his attention would be the claim to be able to demonstrate God's existence. Dawkins criticises McGrath for providing no argument to support his beliefs, other than the fact that they cannot be falsified.
Dawkins believes that "the existence of God is a scientific hypothesis like any other." Regarding Martin Rees's claim in Our Cosmic Habitat that "Such questions lie beyond science, however: they are the domain of philosophers and theologians," Dawkins replies "What expertise can theologians bring to deep cosmological questions that scientists cannot?" by their belief in the details of the Christian religion"
The Richard Dawkins Foundation
In 2006, Dawkins began a new foundation, The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, which is currently in the development phase. Dawkins says in the intro:
"My Trustees and I have set up the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science – RDFRS, or RDF.
Other fields
In his role as professor of the public understanding of science, Dawkins has been a harsh critic of pseudoscience and alternative medicine. His popular work Unweaving the Rainbow takes John Keats' claim – that by explaining the rainbow, Isaac Newton had diminished its beauty – and argues for the opposite conclusion. Deep space, the billions of years of life's evolution, and the microscopic workings of biology and heredity, Dawkins argues, contain more beauty and wonder than myths and pseudoscience. Dawkins wrote a foreword to John Diamond's posthumously published Snake Oil, a book devoted to debunking alternative medicine, in which he asserted that alternative medicine was harmful, if only because it distracted patients away from more successful conventional treatments, and gave people false hopes. Dawkins states that "There is no alternative medicine.
Dawkins has expressed concern over the exponential growth of human population and the issue of overpopulation. In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins briefly introduced the concept of exponential population growth, with the example of Latin America which, at the time the book was written, had a population which doubled every forty years.
As a supporter of the Great Ape Project – a movement to extend certain moral and legal rights to all great apes – Dawkins contributed an article to the Great Ape Project book entitled "Gaps In The Mind", in which he criticised contemporary society's moral attitudes as being based on a "discontinuous, speciesist imperative".
Awards and recognition
Dawkins holds honorary doctorates in science from the University of Westminster, the University of Durham and University of Hull, and is honorary doctor of the Open University.
Other awards he has won include the Royal Society of Literature Award (1987), Los Angeles Times Literary Prize (1987), Zoological Society of London Silver Medal (1989), Michael Faraday Award (1990), Nakayama Prize (1994), Humanist of the Year Award (1996), the fifth International Cosmos Prize (1997), Kistler Prize (2001), Medal of the Presidency of the Italian Republic (2001), and the Bicentennial Kelvin Medal of The Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow (2002).
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.
Publications
Books
The Selfish Gene (1976, 1989, 2006) ISBN 0-19-286092-5 The Extended Phenotype (1982, 1999) ISBN 0-19-288051-9 The Blind Watchmaker (1986, 1991, 2006) ISBN 0-393-31570-3 River Out of Eden (1995) ISBN 0-465-06990-8;See also Papers and commentary by Richard Dawkins (no longer maintained) and Dawkins' Huffington Post articles.
Selected documentaries
Nice Guys Finish First The Blind Watchmaker The God Who Wasn't There Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief The Atheism Tapes The Root of All Evil?Books about Dawkins
Ed Sexton Dawkins and the Selfish Gene (2001) ISBN 1-84046-238-8 – A short summary and defence of Dawkins' ideas. Kim Sterelny Dawkins vs Gould: Survival of the Fittest (2001) ISBN 1-84046-249-3 – Debates on evolutionary theory between Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould. Roger Steer Letter to an Influential Atheist (2003) ISBN 1-85078-478-7 – A Christian critique of Dawkins. Mark Ridley (editors) Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think (2006) ISBN 0-19-929116-0 – A series of 25 essays on Dawkins and his work.See also Books by and about Richard Dawkins and Richard Dawkins Bibliography, these links are useful but no longer maintained.
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