Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins in March, 2005.
Born	(1941-03-26) March 26, 1941 Nairobi, Kenya
Nationality	British
Awards	Zoological Society Silver Medal (1989) Faraday Award (1990) Kistler Prize (2001)
Scientific career
Fields	Evolutionary biology
Institutions	Oxford University
Doctoral advisor	Niko Tinbergen File:Nobel.svg

Clinton Richard Dawkins (born March 261941) is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist and popular science writer who holds the Charles Simonyi Chair for 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. In 1982, he made a major contribution to the science of evolution with the theory, presented in his widely cited book The Extended Phenotype, that phenotypic effects are not limited to an organism's body but can stretch far into the environment, including into the bodies of other organisms. He has since written several best-selling popular books on evolution, and has appeared in a number of television and radio programmes on evolutionary biology, creationism, and religion.

Dawkins is an outspoken atheist, humanist, and sceptic, and is a prominent member of the Brights movement. In a play on Thomas Huxley's epithet "Darwin's bulldog", Dawkins' impassioned defence of evolution has earned him the appellation "Darwin's rottweiler".

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. 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 better understood 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 Marian Stamp in 1967, but they divorced in 1984. Later that year, Dawkins married Eve Barham – with whom he had a daughter, Juliet Emma Dawkins in 1985 – but they too subsequently divorced. He married actress Lalla Ward in 1992. Dawkins had met her through their mutual friend Douglas Adams, who worked with Ward on the BBC TV sci-fi series Doctor Who. Ward has illustrated a number of Dawkins' books.

Career

Dawkins moved to England with his parents at the age of eight, and attended Oundle School. He then 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 MA and DPhil degrees in 1966, and a DSci in 1989.

From 1967 to 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. In 1995, he became Oxford's Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, a position endowed by Charles Simonyi with an express intention that Dawkins be its first holder. He has been a fellow of New College, Oxford since 1970. He has delivered a number of inaugural and other notable lectures, including the Henry Sidgwick Memorial Lecture (1989), first Erasmus Darwin Memorial Lecture (1990), Michael Faraday Lecture (1991), T.H. Huxley Memorial Lecture (1992), Irvine Memorial Lecture (1997), Sheldon Doyle Lecture (1999), Tinbergen Lecture (2000), and the Tanner Lectures (2003).

Dawkins has edited a number of journals and has acted as editorial advisor for several publications, including Encarta Encyclopedia and the Encyclopedia of Evolution. He writes a column for the Council for Secular Humanism's Free Inquiry magazine and serves as a senior editor. He has also been president of the Biological Sciences section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, is a Humanist Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism, a fellow of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal and serves as advisor for several other organisations. He has sat on numerous judging panels for awards as diverse as the Royal Society's Faraday Award and the British Academy Television Awards. 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. He has also been called "the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell" and compared to Ernst Haeckel.

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". 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.

The Selfish Gene

Dawkins has been consistently sceptical about non-adaptive processes in evolution and about selection at levels "above" that of the gene. He is particularly sceptical about the practical possibility or importance of group selection.

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 relatives, 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 C. 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, 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 that 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 Rose, Kamin and Lewontin. 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. This 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, and Jonathan Whitty to apply it. Memetics, gene selection, and sociobiology have been criticised as being excessively reductionist by 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. John Laurent, in The Journal of Memetics, has suggested that the term "meme" itself may have been derived from the work of the little-known German biologist Richard Semon. In 1904, Semon published Die Mneme (which was published in English, as The Mneme, in 1924). His book discussed the cultural transmission of experiences, with insights parallel to those of Dawkins. Laurent also found the use of the term "mneme" in The Soul of the White Ant (1927), by Maurice Maeterlinck, and highlighted its similarities to Dawkins' concept.

Creationism

Dawkins is a prominent 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 generally 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." 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. It's just that it hasn't been observed while it's happening." Dawkins went on to say, "It is rather like a detective coming on a murder after the scene. And you… the detective hasn't actually seen the murder take place, of course. But what you do see is a massive clue ...Circumstantial evidence, but masses of circumstantial evidence. Huge quantities of circumstantial evidence."

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 his essay "Viruses of the Mind" (from which the term "faith-sufferer" originated), he uses memetic theory to analyse and seek to explain the phenomenon of religious belief and some of the common characteristics of organised religions, such as the belief that punishment awaits non-believers. 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 Islamist terrorism to Christian fundamentalism, but he has also argued with liberal believers and religious scientists, 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. He sees education and consciousness-raising as the primary tools in opposing what he considers to be religious dogma. These tools include the fight against certain stereotypes, and he has adopted the positive term "Bright", as a way of putting positive connotations on those with a naturalistic world view. Dawkins notes that feminists have succeeded in making us feel embarrassed when we routinely employ "he" instead of "she". Similarly, he argues, a phrase such as "Catholic child" or "Muslim child" should be seen to be just as improper as, say, "Marxist child" or "Neo-Libertarian child". 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 (against his wishes) The Root of All Evil?, addressing what he sees as the malignant influence of organised religion in society. Critics claimed the programme gave too much time to marginal figures and extremists, and that Dawkins' confrontational style did not help his cause; 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. He further remarked that someone who is deemed an "extremist" in a religiously moderate country, may well be considered "mainstream" in a religiously conservative one.

Dawkins has ardently opposed teaching intelligent design in science lessons. He has described intelligent design as "not a scientific argument at all but a religious one" and is a strong critic of the Creationist front organisation Truth in Science. Dawkins' campaign against religion includes the publication in September 2006 of his book The God Delusion, which he describes as "probably the culmination" of his campaign against religion.

Richard Dawkins at a lecture in Reykjavík, Iceland, June 24, 2006, photo by Matthias Asgeirsson

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 in general. McGrath asserted 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 stated his position that Christian theology is vacuous, and that the only area of theology which might command his attention would be the arguments to demonstrate God's existence. Dawkins criticised McGrath for providing no argument to support his beliefs, other than the fact that they cannot be falsified.

Philosopher Alvin Plantinga's review of The God Delusion argued that it "contains little science; it is mainly philosophy and theology (perhaps ‘atheology’ would be a better term), and evolutionary psychology, along with a substantial dash of social commentary decrying religion and its allegedly baneful effects ... the proportion of insult, ridicule, mockery, spleen and vitriol is astounding ... Now despite the fact that this book is mainly philosophy, Dawkins is not a philosopher (he’s a biologist). Even taking this into account, however, much of the philosophy he purveys is at best jejune. You might say that some of his forays into philosophy are at best sophomoric, but that would be unfair to sophomores; the fact is (grade inflation aside) many of his arguments would receive a failing grade in a sophomore philosophy class. This, combined with the arrogant, smarter-than-thou (‘thou’ being believers in God) tone of the book can be annoying. I shall put irritation aside, however and do my best to take Dawkins’ main argument seriously."[2]

Dawkins believes that "the existence of God is a scientific hypothesis like any other." He disagrees with Stephen Jay Gould's idea of "nonoverlapping magisteria" (NOMA) and with similar ideas proposed by Martin Rees regarding the coexistence of science and religion without conflict, calling the former "positively supine." Regarding 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?" More recently, he called Gould's NOMA proposal "a purely political ploy to win middle-of-the-road religious people to the science camp."

Of "good scientists who are sincerely religious" he mentions Arthur Peacocke, Russell Stannard, John Polkinghorne, and Francis Collins, but says "I remain baffled . . . by their belief in the details of the Christian religion"

The biologist Steven Rose considers that: “Richard’s view about belief is too simplistic, and so hostile that as a committed secularist myself I am uneasy about it. We need to recognise that our own science also depends on certain assumptions about the way the world is – assumptions that he and I of course share.”

The Richard Dawkins Foundation

Main article: Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science

In 2006, Dawkins began a new foundation, The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, which is currently in the development phase. Dawkins explains:

My Trustees and I have set up the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science – RDFRS, or RDF. It is actually two sister foundations of the same name, one legally constituted in Britain and the other legally incorporated in the United States. It has an American trustee based in America (Karen Owens), an American trustee based in Britain (Claire Enders) and a British trustee based in Britain (me). At present, both organizations are companies, with applications for charitable recognition pending in their two countries.

Other fields

Richard Dawkins talking at Kepler's Books, Menlo Park, California, October 29, 2006, photo by Steve Jurvetson

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, "There is no alternative medicine. There is only medicine that works and medicine that doesn't work."

Dawkins has expressed concern over the exponential growth of human population and the issue of overpopulation. In The Selfish Gene, he 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 that doubled every forty years. His proposed solutions can be described as typically humanist, and he is critical of Roman 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.

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 entitled "Gaps In The Mind" to the Great Ape Project book edited by Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer. In this essay, Dawkins criticises 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. He also holds honorary doctorates of letters from the University of St Andrews and Australian National University, and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1997 and Royal Society in 2001. He is vice-president of the British Humanist Association and honorary patron of the Trinity College University Philosophical Society.

Dawkins has won numerous awards, including 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. In 2005 the Hamburg-based Alfred Toepfer Foundation awarded him their Shakespeare Prize in recognition of his "concise and accessible presentation of scientific knowledge". Dawkins received the award for, "Person of the Year 2006" from the BBC's William Crawley.

See also Richard Dawkins in popular culture.

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; Audio (2000) ISBN 0-7528-3985-3
• Climbing Mount Improbable (1996) ISBN 0-393-31682-3
• Unweaving the Rainbow (1998) ISBN 0-618-05673-4
• A Devil's Chaplain (2003) ISBN 0-618-33540-4
• The Ancestor's Tale (2004) ISBN 0-618-00583-8; Audio (2005) ISBN 0-7528-7321-0
• The God Delusion (2006) ISBN 0-618-68000-4; Audio (2006) ISBN 1-84657-037-9

Selected essays

• Viruses of the Mind (online) (1993) – Religion as a mental virus.
• The Real Romance in the Stars (1995) – A critical view of astrology.
• The Emptiness of Theology (1998) – A critical view of theology.
• Snake Oil and Holy Water (1999) – Dawkins' argument that there is no convergence occurring between science and theism.
• Bin Laden's Victory (2003) – Guardian editorial arguing Osama bin Laden was the real victor of the Iraq War.
• What Use is Religion? (2004) – Argues that religion may have no survival value other than to itself.
• Race and Creation (2004) – On race, its usage and a theory of how it evolved.
• The giant tortoise's tale, The turtle's tale and The lava lizard's tale (2005) – A series of three articles written after a visit to the Galápagos Islands.

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 (2001) Dawkins and the Selfish Gene (ISBN 1-84046-238-8) – A short summary and defence of Dawkins' ideas.
• Kim Sterelny (2001) Dawkins vs Gould: Survival of the Fittest (ISBN 1-84046-249-3) – Debates on evolutionary theory between Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould.
• Roger Steer (2003) Letter to an Influential Atheist (ISBN 1-85078-478-7) – A Christian critique of Dawkins.
• Alister McGrath (2005) Dawkins' God: Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of Life (ISBN 1-4051-2538-1) – A critique of Dawkins' attack on theistic religion.
• Alan Grafen & Mark Ridley (eds.) (2006) Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think (ISBN 0-19-929116-0) – An anthology of 25 essays on Dawkins and his work.

Articles critical of Dawkins

• Book review by creationist of Climbing Mount Improbable
• Weasel, a flexible program for investigating deterministic computer ‘demonstrations’ of evolution
• Does Richard Dawkins Exist? A parable
• Alvin Plantinga's review of The God Delusion
• The Problem of Information for the Theory of Evolution: Has Dawkins really solved it?

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

External links

Websites

• The Richard Dawkins Foundation, Dawkins' foundation for the promotion of science and reason.
• The Current Simonyi Professor: Richard Dawkins
  • Dawkins FAQs
• The World of Richard Dawkins, extensive website on Dawkins.
• The Third Culture: Richard Dawkins, Edge.org profile.

Interviews and feature articles

• "Revolutionary Evolutionist", profile by Michael Schrage, Wired, July 1995.
• "Darwin's dangerous disciple", interview with Frank Miele, Scepsis, 1995.
• "Double-Dealing in Darwin", criticism of Dawkins' atheism and belief in evolution as a 'secular religion', Michael Ruse, Beliefnet, 2000.
• "Darwin's child", profile by Simon Hattenstone, The Guardian, February 10, 2003.
• The Atheism Tapes, program 4, transcript of an extended interview with Dawkins for the Jonathan Miller BBC TV series, 2004.
• Belief radio interview, transcipt of a BBC radio interview for the Belief series, 2004.
• "The Man Behind the Meme: An interview with Richard Dawkins", interview with Jim Holt, Slate, December 1, 2004.
• "The Atheist", interview with Gordy Slack, Salon.com, April 28, 2005.
• "Richard Dawkins: Beyond belief", profile by John Crace, The Guardian, January 10, 2006.
• "The flying spaghetti monster", interview with Steve Paulson, Salon.com, October 13, 2006.
• "God vs. Science", discussion with Francis Collins, Time, November 13, 2006

Multimedia

• Audio and video files featuring Dawkins. (Note: these links also contain media files not directly related to Dawkins personally)
• "Richard Dawkins - The God Delusion", audio interview, Point of Inquiry, October 16, 2006.
• Morning Report radio interview, audio interview with Kim Hill, National Radio, December 16, 2006

Other

• Richard Dawkins at IMDb
• Livejournal community dedicated to discussing Dawkins' ideas and activities