Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins, born Clinton Richard Dawkins on 26 March 1941 in Nairobi, Colonial Kenya, is a British evolutionary biologist, zoologist, science communicator, noted atheist, and author. He later dropped Clinton from his name by deed poll. His father, Clinton John Dawkins, worked as an agricultural civil servant in the British Colonial Service in Nyasaland, present-day Malawi, and served in the King’s African Rifles during the Second World War. In 1949, when Dawkins was eight, the family returned to England. His father had inherited Over Norton Park in Oxfordshire, which he farmed commercially.

Dawkins grew up with parents who were interested in the natural sciences and answered his questions in scientific terms. He has described his childhood as “a normal Anglican upbringing,” and he accepted Christianity until midway through his teenage years. He later concluded that evolution gave a better explanation for the complexity of life than design. That change of mind became part of the intellectual ground for his later atheism, though he has also described himself in interviews as a “cultural Christian” and a “cultural Anglican.”

His education took him from Chafyn Grove School in Wiltshire to Oundle School in Northamptonshire, where he read Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian for the first time. He studied zoology at Balliol College, Oxford, graduating in 1962, and was tutored by Nobel Prize-winning ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen. Dawkins continued under Tinbergen as a research student, receiving his D.Phil. by 1966. Tinbergen’s work in animal behaviour, especially instinct, learning, and choice, shaped the setting for Dawkins’s own early research on models of animal decision-making.

From 1967 to 1969, Dawkins was an assistant professor of zoology at the University of California, Berkeley, where students and faculty were largely opposed to the Vietnam War and where he became involved in anti-war demonstrations and activities. He returned to Oxford in 1970 as a lecturer, became a reader in zoology in 1990, and in 1995 was named the first Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science. He held that post until 2008. Since 1970 he has been a fellow of New College, Oxford, and he is now an emeritus fellow.

Dawkins is best known to a wide public for books that explain evolution with force and clarity. The Selfish Gene, published in 1976, set out the gene-centred view of evolution and coined the word “meme.” The Blind Watchmaker in 1986 explained how natural selection, a cumulative and non-random process working with random variation, can create complexity. Climbing Mount Improbable in 1996 grew out of his Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, Growing Up in the Universe. With Yan Wong, he co-authored The Ancestor’s Tale in 2004, described as a “Chaucerian pilgrimage to the dawn of life.”

As a prominent atheist, Dawkins is also known with Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris as one of the “Four Horsemen of New Atheism.” In The God Delusion, published in 2006, he made the case for atheism; The Sunday Times later described it as one of the 12 most influential books since the Second World War. That same year he founded the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. He edited The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing in 2008, wrote the children’s book The Magic of Reality in 2011, and published two memoirs, An Appetite for Wonder and Brief Candle in the Dark. His words continue to be read because they join argument, science, and wonder in direct public speech.