Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins was born on 26 March 1941 in Nairobi, Kenya, to British parents, and moved to England as a child. He studied zoology at Balliol College, Oxford, earning a BA in 1962 and a DPhil in 1966 under the ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen, who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for founding the study of animal behaviour; Dawkins's own early research, done under Tinbergen and published in peer-reviewed journals, concerned decision-making and imprinting in chicks. He taught briefly at the University of California, Berkeley, then returned to Oxford as a Reader in Zoology, and from 1995 to 2008 held the university's first Simonyi Professorship for the Public Understanding of Science, a named chair rather than an honorary title. His 1976 book The Selfish Gene argued for a gene-centred view of evolution, in which the gene rather than the organism or the group is the primary unit natural selection acts on and organisms can be understood as vehicles built for their genes' own replication; the book also coined the term meme for a unit of cultural transmission modelled on the gene. In his 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker he argued that punctuated equilibrium, proposed a decade earlier by Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould, was better described as a variant of ordinary gradualist neo-Darwinism than as the sharp break from it that its reception in the press had suggested, a position that put him in direct, continuing disagreement with Gould over how evolutionary change is best characterised. Dawkins is also widely known as a public advocate of atheism, most prominently in his 2006 book The God Delusion, work outside the scope of his scientific biography recorded here.