Marian Dawkins

Marian Ellina Stamp Dawkins (born 13 February 1945) is professor for animal behaviour at the University of Oxford, where she heads the Animal Behaviour Research Group. She has published several books, one of which has been translated into German, and many peer-reviewed papers. Her research interests include animal welfare, vision in birds, animal signalling, behavioural synchrony and animal consciousness. She is skeptical about the scientific basis for the consciousness of nonhuman animals. In her book Why Animals Matter: Animal Consciousness, Animal Welfare, and Human Well-being (2012) she wrote "there is no proof either way about animal consciousness and that it does not serve animals well to claim that there is".

Personal life

She married evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins on 19 August 1967. They divorced in 1984.

Bibliography

• Animal Suffering: The Science of Animal Welfare. Chapman and Hall. 1980.
• Unravelling Animal Behaviour. Longman. 1986.
• Through Our Eyes Only?: The Search for Animal Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1993.
• She was coauthor with Aubrey Manning of the fourth and fifth editions of An Introduction to Animal Behaviour. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1993 and 1998.
• Living with The Selfish Gene. One of the collected essays in Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think. Editors: Alan Grafen, Mark Ridley. Oxford University Press. 2006

Criticism

The evolutionary biologist Marc Bekoff has vigorously criticised Dawkins for dismissing a large body of scientific research. However Dawkins has countered that Bekoff misrepresents her, and says that "my concern is to make the case for animal emotions as watertight as possible and thereby to strengthen it. That is the way science progresses and always has."