Richard Dawkins

From Freepedia

Professor Clinton Richard Dawkins, FRS (born March 26, 1941), better known as Richard Dawkins, is a British ethologist and popular science writer. He is best known for popularising the Williams Revolution in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene and being an outspoken atheist and humanist.

Contents

Biography

Dawkins was born in Nairobi, Kenya, where his father was a farmer and wartime soldier, called up from the colonial service in Nyasaland (now Malawi). His parents were both interested in the natural sciences, and answered the young Dawkins' questions in scientific, not mythic, terms.[1] Dawkins' parents come from an upper-middle class family, described in Burke's Landed Gentry as "Dawkins of Over Norton". His father, Clinton John Dawkins, was a descendant of the Clinton family which held the Earldom of Lincoln. His mother was Jean Mary Vyvyan Dawkins (née Ladner).

Dawkins moved to England when he was eight with his parents, and was educated at Oundle School. He received a second class BA degree in zoology from Balliol College, Oxford in 1962, where he studied under Nobel Prize winning Dutch ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen. This was followed by MA and DPhil degrees 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, Juliet, but they, too, divorced; she subsequently died. He married his third wife, actress Lalla Ward, in 1992, after having been introduced to her by Douglas Adams (who was a colleague of hers on the production team of Doctor Who; Dawkins and Adams had quickly become friends after he'd written a fan letter to Adams).

Dawkins 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 first Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2001. He won the International Cosmos Prize (Japan) for 1997, and the Kistler Prize (USA) for 2001. He has honorary doctorates in literature as well as science.

Work

He is probably best known for his popularisation of the concept of the selfish gene (see "Williams Revolution"), described in his book The Selfish Gene. As an ethologist, interested 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 formulated by his friend Bill Hamilton.

Dawkins has been one of the major proponents of sociobiological theory and coined the term meme, which spawned the theory of memetics. This has been criticised as being overly-reductionist, for example by the philosopher Mary Midgley with whom Dawkins has debated since the early 1980s.

He 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 writes a column for Free Inquiry magazine, and since May 2005, has been a contributing blogger at The Huffington Post.

Debates: theory of evolution, sociobiology, and religion

In the controversy over interpretations of the theory 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 popularisers of the contesting viewpoints, rather than because either is the more substantial or extreme champion of these positions. A typical example of Dawkins' position is his scathing review (published in January 1985) of Not in Our Genes by Rose, Kamin and Lewontin. Two others often considered to be in the same camp as Dawkins are Pinker and Dennett.

In a December 2004 interview with Bill Moyers ("Battle over evolution", Now, PBS network: transcript), Dawkins stated, ‘But, 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'.

He is an ardent and outspoken atheist, an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society and vice-president of the British Humanist Association. He also writes for the Council for Secular Humanism's magazine Free Inquiry and serves as a Senior Editor. In his essay "Viruses of the Mind", he uses memetics theory to explain the phenomenon of religious belief and the various characteristics of organised religions, such as the common belief in punishments awaiting non-believers. The Atheist Alliance instituted the Richard Dawkins Award in 2003 in his honour.

Dawkins continues to be a prominent figure in contemporary public debate on issues related to science and religion. In opposing what he considers religious dogma, Dawkins sees education and consciousness-raising as primary tools, including fight against certain stereotypes. Just like feminists, he says, succeeded in making us feel embarrassed when we use 'he' when it could be 'she', a phrase like 'Catholic child' or 'Muslim child' must be felt as improper as 'Marxist child' or 'Neo-Libertarian child'. Following the September 11, 2001 attacks, when asked if the world had changed, and if it had, how had it 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!

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 with the public; Dawkins argued 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." (A Devil's Chaplain, p. 256)

As a supporter of the Great Ape Project, a movement to extend 'human rights' to all Great Apes (Gorillas, Chimpanzees, and Orang-utangs), he contributed an article to a book of the same name entitled 'Gaps In The Mind.' In this article, he criticised contemporary society's moral attitudes which are based on a 'discontinous, speciesist imperative.'

Bibliography

Books by Dawkins

According to an interview with salon.com published 2005-04-30, Dawkins is currently writing on a new book, tentatively titled The God Delusion.

Books about Dawkins

See also Books by and about Richard Dawkins and Richard Dawkins Bibliography, these links are useful but no longer maintained.

Essays by Dawkins

See also Papers and commentary by Richard Dawkins, no longer maintained.

Documentaries

Multimedia

Criticisms

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
Richard Dawkins
Books: The Selfish Gene - The Extended Phenotype - The Blind Watchmaker - River Out Of Eden - Climbing Mount Improbable - Unweaving the Rainbow - A Devil's Chaplain - The Ancestor's Tale
See also: W. D. Hamilton - Williams revolution - atheism - humanism - evolution - Lalla Ward
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