Clinton Richard Dawkins DSc, FRS, FRSL;
born March 26, 1941
Dawkins first came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene which popularised the gene-centric view of evolution, and introduced the terms meme and memetics into the lexicon.
In 1982, he made a major original contribution to the science of evolution with the theory, presented in his book The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene, that phenotypic effects are not limited to an organism's body but can stretch far into the environment, including the bodies of other organisms.
He has since written several best-selling popular books on evolution and appeared in a number of television programmes on evolutionary biology, creationism, and religion.
Dawkins is an atheist, Humanist, skeptic and ~ as a commentator on science, religion and politics ~ is among the English-speaking world's best known public intellectuals.
Personal life
Dawkins was born in Nairobi, Kenya, where 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. Both were interested in the natural sciences and answered the young Dawkins' questions in more scientific than anecdotal or supernatural terms.
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. He was later reconverted because he was persuaded by the argument from design, though he began to feel that the customs of the Church of England were "absurd," and had more to do with dictating morals than with God. When he was taught about evolution at the age of sixteen, his religious position again changed because he felt that evolution could account for the complexity of life in purely material terms, and thus that a designer was not necessary.
He married his first wife, Marian Stamp, in 1967 but they divorced in 1984. Later that year, Dawkins married Eve Barham ~ with whom he had a daughter, Juliet ~ but they too subsequently divorced. He married his third wife, actress Lalla Ward, in 1992. Ward has illustrated a number of Dawkins' books.
Career
Dawkins moved to England with his parents at the age of eight. He studied zoology at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was tutored by Nobel Prize-winning ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen. He gained a second class BA degree in zoology in 1962, followed by an MA and DPhil degree in 1966.
Between 1967 and 1969, Dawkins was an assistant professor of zoology at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1970 he was appointed a lecturer and then in 1990 a reader in zoology at the University of Oxford, before becoming the University's first Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science in 1995.
He has been a fellow of New College, Oxford, since 1970. In 1991, he delivered the annual Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, entitled Growing Up in the Universe ~ the lectures later formed the basis for his book Climbing Mount Improbable.
In 2005, Discover magazine referred to Dawkins as "Darwin's rottweiler," a description recalling the epithet "Darwin's bulldog" given to Darwin's nineteenth-century advocate Thomas Henry Huxley. It also suggests comparison with Pope Benedict XVI, who, as Cardinal Ratzinger, was known as "God's rottweiler."
Work
Evolutionary biology
Dawkins is probably best known for his popularisation of the gene-centred 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: The Long Reach of the Gene (1982), in which he describes natural selection as "the process whereby replicators out-propagate each other."
As an ethologist, interested in animal behaviour and its relation to natural selection, he advocates the idea that the gene is the principal unit of selection in evolution.
In his books, 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. Altruism appears at first to be a paradox, as helping others costs precious resources ~ possibly even one's own health and life ~ thus reducing one's own fitness.
Previously, this had been interpreted by many as an aspect of group selection, that is, individuals were doing what was best for the survival of the population or species. But W. D. Hamilton used the gene-centered view to explain altruism in terms of inclusive fitness and kin selection, that is, individuals behave altruistically towards their close relations, who share many of their own genes.
(Hamilton's work features prominently in Dawkins' books, and the two became friends at Oxford; 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. The reasoning here is that in a selection event, an individual either succeeds or fails to survive and reproduce, but over time it is proportions of alleles in a population which change.
In The Selfish Gene, however, Dawkins explains that he is using George Christopher Williams' definition of gene as "that which segregates and recombines with appreciable frequency."
Similarly, it is commonly argued that genes can not survive alone, but must cooperate to build an individual, but in The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene, 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.
Recombination is a process which occurs during meiosis in which pairs of chromosomes cross over to swap segments of DNA. 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. This reflects the pre-eminence of each as a populariser of contesting viewpoints, rather than because either is the more substantial or extreme champion of these positions.
In particular, Dawkins and Gould have been prominent commentators in the controversy over sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, with Dawkins generally approving and Gould critical.
A typical example of Dawkins' position is his scathing review (1985) of Not in Our Genes by Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose, Leon J. Kamin. 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.
Creationism
Dawkins is an established critic of creationism, describing it as a "preposterous, mind-shrinking falsehood." His book The Blind Watchmaker is a critique of the argument from design, and his other popular-science works often touch on the topic.
On the advice of his late colleague Stephen Jay Gould, Dawkins refuses to participate in debates with creationists because doing so would give them the "oxygen of respectability" that they want. He argues that creationists "don't mind being beaten in an argument. What matters is that we give them recognition by bothering to argue with them in public."
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. It's just that it hasn't been observed while it's happening."
Religion
Dawkins is an ardent and outspoken atheist. He 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 R. Miller to the Bishop of Oxford Richard Harries.
Dawkins continues to be a prominent figure in contemporary public debate on issues relating to science and religion. He sees education and consciousness-raising as the primary tools in opposing what he considers to be religious dogma.
Following the September 11, 2001 attacks, when asked how the world might have changed, Dawkins responded:
"Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that. Revealed faith is not harmless nonsense, it can be lethally dangerous nonsense. Dangerous because it gives people unshakeable confidence in their own righteousness. Dangerous because it gives them false courage to kill themselves, which automatically removes normal barriers to killing others. Dangerous because it teaches enmity to others labelled only by a difference of inherited tradition. And dangerous because we have all bought into a weird respect, which uniquely protects religion from normal criticism. Let's now stop being so damned respectful!"
In January 2006, Dawkins presented a two-part Channel 4 documentary entitled The Root of All Evil?, addressing what he sees as the malignant influence of organised religion in society.
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. In response, Dawkins criticises McGrath for providing no argument to support his beliefs, other than the fact that they cannot be falsified.
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 turned it around. 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. There is only medicine that works and medicine that doesn't work."
Dawkins has expressed a Malthusian concern over the exponential growth of human population and the issue of overpopulation. He is critical of 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 ~ starvation.
Books
The Selfish Gene (1976; 30th anniversary edition 25 May 2006)
The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene (1982; revised edition 1999)
The Blind Watchmaker (1986; reissued 1996)
River Out of Eden (1995; reprint edition 1996); Audio (2000) ISBN 0752839853
Climbing Mount Improbable (1997)
Unweaving the Rainbow
A Devil's Chaplain (2003)
The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life (2004); Audio (2005) ISBN 0752873210
Since 2004 Dawkins has been working on a new book, tentatively titled The God Delusion.
Books about Dawkins
Kim Sterelny, Dawkins vs Gould: Survival of the Fittest (2001) ~ Debates on evolutionary theory between Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould.
Roger Steer, Letter to an Influential Atheist (2003) ~ A Christian critique of Dawkins.
Alister McGrath, Dawkins' God: Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of Life (2005) ~ A critique of Dawkins' attack on theistic religion.
Alan Grafen & Mark Ridley (editors), Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think (2006) ~ A series of 26 essays on Dawkins and his work.
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