Richard Dawkins

For the archaeologist, see Richard MacGillivray Dawkins.

Richard Dawkins FRS FRSL
Dawkins in 2010
Born	Clinton Richard Dawkins (1941-03-26) 26 March 1941 Nairobi, British Kenya
Citizenship	United Kingdom
Education	Oundle School
Alma mater	University of Oxford (MA, DPhil)
Known for	Gene-centred view of evolution Concept of the meme Middle World Extended phenotype Advocacy of science; criticism of religion; "New Atheism"
Spouse(s)	Marian Stamp ​ ​ (m. 1967; div. 1984)​ Eve Barham (m. 1984; div. 19??) Lalla Ward (m. 1992; sep. 2016)
Children	1
Awards	ZSL Silver Medal (1989) Michael Faraday Prize (1990) International Cosmos Prize (1997) Nierenberg Prize (2009) FRS (2001)
Scientific career
Institutions	University of California, Berkeley New College, Oxford University of Oxford New College of the Humanities
Thesis	Selective pecking in the domestic chick (1967)
Doctoral advisor	Nikolaas Tinbergen
Doctoral students	Alan Grafen Mark Ridley
Website	richarddawkins.net
Signature

Richard Dawkins FRS FRSL (born Clinton Richard Dawkins; 26 March 1941) is an English ethologist, evolutionary biologist, and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was the University of Oxford's Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008.

Dawkins first came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which popularised the gene-centred view of evolution and introduced the term meme. With his book The Extended Phenotype (1982), he introduced into evolutionary biology the influential concept that the phenotypic effects of a gene are not necessarily limited to an organism's body, but can stretch far into the environment. In 2006, he founded the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science.

Dawkins is known as an outspoken atheist. He is well known for his criticism of creationism and intelligent design. In The Blind Watchmaker (1986), he argues against the watchmaker analogy, an argument for the existence of a supernatural creator based upon the complexity of living organisms. Instead, he describes evolutionary processes as analogous to a blind watchmaker, in that reproduction, mutation, and selection are unguided by any designer. In The God Delusion (2006), Dawkins contends that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that religious faith is a delusion.

Dawkins has been awarded academic and writing awards, and he makes television, radio, and Internet appearances, predominantly discussing his books, atheism, and his ideas and opinions as a public intellectual.

Background

Early life

Clinton Richard Dawkins was born in Nairobi, then in British Kenya, on 26 March 1941. Dawkins later dropped Clinton from his name by deed poll. He is the son of Jean Mary Vyvyan (née Ladner; 1916–2019) and Clinton John Dawkins (1915–2010), an agricultural civil servant in the British Colonial Service in Nyasaland (present-day Malawi), of an Oxfordshire landed gentry family. His father was called up into the King's African Rifles during World War II and returned to England in 1949, when Dawkins was eight. His father had inherited a country estate, Over Norton Park in Oxfordshire, which he farmed commercially. Dawkins considers himself English and lives in Oxford, England. He has a younger sister, Sarah.

Both his parents were interested in natural sciences, and they answered Dawkins's questions in scientific terms. Dawkins describes his childhood as "a normal Anglican upbringing". He embraced Christianity until halfway through his teenage years, at which point he concluded that the theory of evolution was a better explanation for life's complexity, and ceased believing in a god. Dawkins states: "The main residual reason why I was religious was from being so impressed with the complexity of life and feeling that it had to have a designer, and I think it was when I realised that Darwinism was a far superior explanation that pulled the rug out from under the argument of design. And that left me with nothing."

Education

The Great Hall, Oundle School

From 1954 to 1959 Dawkins attended Oundle School in Northamptonshire, an English public school with a Church of England ethos, where he was in Laundimer House. While at Oundle, Dawkins read Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian for the first time. He studied zoology at Balliol College, Oxford, graduating in 1962; while there, he was tutored by Nobel Prize-winning ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen. He graduated with second-class honours. He continued as a research student under Tinbergen's supervision, receiving his MA and Doctor of Philosophy degrees by 1966, and remained a research assistant for another year. Tinbergen was a pioneer in the study of animal behaviour, particularly in the areas of instinct, learning, and choice; Dawkins's research in this period concerned models of animal decision-making.

Teaching

From 1967 to 1969, Dawkins was an assistant professor of zoology at the University of California, Berkeley. During this period, the students and faculty at UC Berkeley were largely opposed to the ongoing Vietnam War, and Dawkins became involved in the anti-war demonstrations and activities. He returned to the University of Oxford in 1970 as a lecturer. In 1990, he became a reader in zoology. In 1995, he was appointed Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, a position that had been endowed by Charles Simonyi with the express intention that the holder "be expected to make important contributions to the public understanding of some scientific field", and that its first holder should be Richard Dawkins. He held that professorship from 1995 until 2008.

Since 1970, he has been a fellow of New College, Oxford, and he is now an emeritus fellow. He has delivered many lectures, including the Henry Sidgwick Memorial Lecture (1989), the first Erasmus Darwin Memorial Lecture (1990), the Michael Faraday Lecture (1991), the T. H. Huxley Memorial Lecture (1992), the Irvine Memorial Lecture (1997), the Tinbergen Lecture (2004), and the Tanner Lectures (2003). In 1991, he gave the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures for Children on Growing Up in the Universe. He also has edited several journals, and has acted as editorial advisor to the Encarta Encyclopedia and the Encyclopedia of Evolution. He is listed as a senior editor and a columnist of the Council for Secular Humanism's Free Inquiry magazine, and has been a member of the editorial board of Skeptic magazine since its foundation.

Dawkins has sat on judging panels for awards as diverse as the Royal Society's Faraday Award and the British Academy Television Awards, and has been president of the Biological Sciences section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2004, Balliol College, Oxford, instituted the Dawkins Prize, awarded for "outstanding research into the ecology and behaviour of animals whose welfare and survival may be endangered by human activities". In September 2008, he retired from his professorship, announcing plans to "write a book aimed at youngsters in which he will warn them against believing in 'anti-scientific' fairytales."

In 2011, Dawkins joined the professoriate of the New College of the Humanities, a private university in London established by A. C. Grayling, which opened in September 2012.

Work

Evolutionary biology

Further information: Gene-centred view of evolution

At the University of Texas at Austin, March 2008

Dawkins is best known for his popularisation of the gene as the principal unit of selection in evolution; this view is most clearly set out in his books:

• The Selfish Gene (1976), in which he notes that "all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities".
• The Extended Phenotype (1982), in which he describes natural selection as "the process whereby replicators out-propagate each other". He introduces to a wider audience the influential concept he presented in 1977, that the phenotypic effects of a gene are not necessarily limited to an organism's body, but can stretch far into the environment, including the bodies of other organisms. Dawkins regarded the extended phenotype as his single most important contribution to evolutionary biology and he considered niche construction to be a special case of extended phenotype. The concept of extended phenotype helps explain evolution, but it does not help predict specific outcomes.

Dawkins has consistently been sceptical about non-adaptive processes in evolution (such as spandrels, described by Gould and Lewontin) and about selection at levels "above" that of the gene. He is particularly sceptical about the practical possibility or importance of group selection as a basis for understanding altruism. This behaviour appears at first to be an evolutionary paradox, since helping others costs precious resources and decreases one's own fitness. Previously, many had interpreted this as an aspect of group selection: individuals are doing what is best for the survival of the population or species as a whole. British evolutionary biologist W. D. Hamilton used gene-frequency analysis in his inclusive fitness theory to show how hereditary altruistic traits can evolve if there is sufficient genetic similarity between actors and recipients of such altruism (including close relatives).^[a] Hamilton's inclusive fitness has since been successfully applied to a wide range of organisms, including humans. Similarly, Robert Trivers, thinking in terms of the gene-centred model, developed the theory of reciprocal altruism, whereby one organism provides a benefit to another in the expectation of future reciprocation. Dawkins popularised these ideas in The Selfish Gene, and developed them in his own work. In June 2012, Dawkins was highly critical of fellow biologist E. O. Wilson's 2012 book The Social Conquest of Earth as misunderstanding Hamilton's theory of kin selection. Dawkins has also been strongly critical of the Gaia hypothesis of the independent scientist James Lovelock.

Critics of Dawkins's biological approach suggest that taking the gene as the unit of selection (a single event in which an individual either succeeds or fails to reproduce) is misleading. The gene could be better described, they say, as a unit of evolution (the long-term changes in allele frequencies in a population). In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins explains that he is using George C. Williams's definition of the gene as "that which segregates and recombines with appreciable frequency". Another common objection is that a gene cannot survive alone, but must cooperate with other genes to build an individual, and therefore a gene cannot be an independent "unit". In The Extended Phenotype, Dawkins suggests that from an individual gene's viewpoint, all other genes are part of the environment to which it is adapted.

Advocates for higher levels of selection (such as Richard Lewontin, David Sloan Wilson, and Elliott Sober) suggest that there are many phenomena (including altruism) that gene-based selection cannot satisfactorily explain. The philosopher Mary Midgley, with whom Dawkins clashed in print concerning The Selfish Gene, has criticised gene selection, memetics, and sociobiology as being excessively reductionist; she has suggested that the popularity of Dawkins's work is due to factors in the Zeitgeist such as the increased individualism of the Thatcher/Reagan decades.

In a set of controversies over the mechanisms and interpretation of evolution (what has been called 'The Darwin Wars'), one faction is often named after Dawkins, while the other faction is named after the American palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould, reflecting the pre-eminence of each as a populariser of the pertinent ideas. In particular, Dawkins and Gould have been prominent commentators in the controversy over sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, with Dawkins generally approving and Gould generally being critical. A typical example of Dawkins's position is his scathing review of Not in Our Genes by Steven Rose, Leon J. Kamin, and Richard C. Lewontin. Two other thinkers who are often considered to be allied with Dawkins on the subject are Steven Pinker and Daniel Dennett; Dennett has promoted a gene-centred view of evolution and defended reductionism in biology. Despite their academic disagreements, Dawkins and Gould did not have a hostile personal relationship, and Dawkins dedicated a large portion of his 2003 book A Devil's Chaplain posthumously to Gould, who had died the previous year.

When asked if Darwinism informs his everyday apprehension of life, Dawkins says, "In one way it does. My eyes are constantly wide open to the extraordinary fact of existence. Not just human existence but the existence of life and how this breathtakingly powerful process, which is natural selection, has managed to take the very simple facts of physics and chemistry and build them up to redwood trees and humans. That's never far from my thoughts, that sense of amazement. On the other hand I certainly don't allow Darwinism to influence my feelings about human social life," implying that he feels that individual human beings can opt out of the survival machine of Darwinism since they are freed by the consciousness of self.

Fathering the meme

Main article: Meme

In his book The Selfish Gene, Dawkins coined the word meme (the behavioural equivalent of a gene) as a way to encourage readers to think about how Darwinian principles might be extended beyond the realm of genes. It was intended as an extension of his "replicators" argument, but it took on a life of its own in the hands of other authors, such as Daniel Dennett and Susan Blackmore. These popularisations then led to the emergence of memetics, a field from which Dawkins has distanced himself.

Dawkins's meme refers to any cultural entity that an observer might consider a replicator of a certain idea or set of ideas. He hypothesised that people could view many cultural entities as capable of such replication, generally through communication and contact with humans, who have evolved as efficient (although not perfect) copiers of information and behaviour. Because memes are not always copied perfectly, they might become refined, combined, or otherwise modified with other ideas; this results in new memes, which may themselves prove more or less efficient replicators than their predecessors, thus providing a framework for a hypothesis of cultural evolution based on memes, a notion that is analogous to the theory of biological evolution based on genes.

Although Dawkins invented the term meme, he has not claimed that the idea was entirely novel, and there have been other expressions for similar ideas in the past. For instance, John Laurent has suggested that the term may have derived from the work of the little-known German biologist Richard Semon. Semon regarded "mneme" as the collective set of neural memory traces (conscious or subconscious) that were inherited, although such view would be considered as Lamarckian by modern biologists. Laurent also found the use of the term mneme in Maurice Maeterlinck's The Life of the White Ant (1926), and Maeterlinck himself stated that he obtained the phrase from Semon's work. In his own work, Maeterlinck tried to explain memory in termites and ants by claiming that neural memory traces were added "upon the individual mneme". Nonetheless, James Gleick describes Dawkins's concept of the meme as "his most famous memorable invention, far more influential than his selfish genes or his later proselytising against religiosity".

Foundation

Main article: Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science

In 2006, Dawkins founded the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science (RDFRS), a non-profit organisation. RDFRS financed research on the psychology of belief and religion, financed scientific education programs and materials, and publicised and supported charitable organisations that are secular in nature. In January 2016, it was announced that the foundation was merging with the Center for Inquiry, with Dawkins becoming a member of the new organization's board of directors.

Criticism of religion

Lecturing on his book The God Delusion, 24 June 2006

Dawkins was confirmed into the Church of England at the age of 13, but began to grow sceptical of the beliefs. He said that his understanding of science and evolutionary processes led him to question how adults in positions of leadership in a civilised world could still be so uneducated in biology, and is puzzled by how belief in God could remain among individuals who are sophisticated in science. Dawkins notes that some physicists use 'God' as a metaphor for the general awe-inspiring mysteries of the universe, which causes confusion and misunderstanding among people who incorrectly think they are talking about a mystical being who forgives sins, transubstantiates wine, or makes people live after they die. He disagrees with Stephen Jay Gould's principle of nonoverlapping magisteria (NOMA) and suggests that the existence of God should be treated as a scientific hypothesis like any other. Dawkins became a prominent critic of religion and has stated his opposition to religion as twofold: religion is both a source of conflict and a justification for belief without evidence. He considers faith—belief that is not based on evidence—as "one of the world's great evils".

On his spectrum of theistic probability, which has seven levels between 1 (100% certainty that a God or gods exist) and 7 (100% certainty that a God or gods do not exist), Dawkins has said he is a 6.9, which represents a "de facto atheist" who thinks "I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there." When asked about his slight uncertainty, Dawkins quips, "I am agnostic to the extent that I am agnostic about fairies at the bottom of the garden." In May 2014, at the Hay Festival in Wales, Dawkins explained that while he does not believe in the supernatural elements of the Christian faith, he still has nostalgia for the ceremonial side of religion. In addition to beliefs in deities, Dawkins has criticized religious beliefs as irrational, such as that Jesus turned water into wine, that an embryo starts as a blob, that magic underwear will protect you, that Jesus was resurrected, that semen comes from the spine, that Jesus walked on water, that the sun sets in a marsh, that the Garden of Eden existed in Missouri, that Jesus' mother was a virgin, that Muhammad split the moon, and that Lazarus was raised from the dead.

Dawkins has risen to prominence in public debates concerning science and religion since the publication of his most popular book, The God Delusion, in 2006, which became an international best seller. As of 2015, more than three million copies have been sold and the book has been translated into over 30 languages. Its success has been seen by many as indicative of a change in the contemporary cultural zeitgeist and has also been identified with the rise of New Atheism. In the book, Dawkins contends that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that religious faith is a delusion—"a fixed false belief". In his February 2002 TED talk entitled "Militant atheism", Dawkins urged all atheists to openly state their position and to fight the incursion of the church into politics and science. On 30 September 2007, Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett met at Hitchens's residence for a private, unmoderated discussion that lasted two hours. The event was videotaped and entitled "The Four Horsemen".

Dawkins sees education and consciousness-raising as the primary tools in opposing what he considers to be religious dogma and indoctrination. These tools include the fight against certain stereotypes, and he has adopted the term bright as a way of associating positive public connotations with those who possess a naturalistic worldview. He has given support to the idea of a free-thinking school, which would not "indoctrinate children" but would instead teach children to ask for evidence and be skeptical, critical, and open-minded. Such a school, says Dawkins, should "teach comparative religion, and teach it properly without any bias towards particular religions, and including historically important but dead religions, such as those of ancient Greece and the Norse gods, if only because these, like the Abrahamic scriptures, are important for understanding English literature and European history. Inspired by the consciousness-raising successes of feminists in arousing widespread embarrassment at the routine use of "he" instead of "she", Dawkins similarly suggests that phrases such as "Catholic child" and "Muslim child" should be considered as socially absurd as, for instance, "Marxist child", as he believes that children should not be classified based on the ideological or religious beliefs of their parents.

Criticism of creationism

Dawkins is a prominent critic of creationism, a religious belief that humanity, life, and the universe were created by a deity without recourse to evolution. He has described the Young Earth creationist view that the Earth is only a few thousand years old as "a preposterous, mind-shrinking falsehood". His 1986 book, The Blind Watchmaker, contains a sustained critique of the argument from design, an important creationist argument. In the book, Dawkins argues against the watchmaker analogy made famous by the eighteenth-century English theologian William Paley via his book Natural Theology, in which Paley argues that just as a watch is too complicated and too functional to have sprung into existence merely by accident, so too must all living things—with their far greater complexity—be purposefully designed. Dawkins shares the view generally held by scientists that natural selection is sufficient to explain the apparent functionality and non-random complexity of the biological world, and can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, albeit as an automatic, unguided by any designer, nonintelligent, blind watchmaker.

Wearing a scarlet 'A' lapel pin, at the 34th annual conference of American Atheists (2008)

In 1986, Dawkins and biologist John Maynard Smith participated in an Oxford Union debate against A. E. Wilder-Smith (a Young Earth creationist) and Edgar Andrews (president of the Biblical Creation Society).^[b] In general, however, Dawkins has followed the advice of his late colleague Stephen Jay Gould and refused to participate in formal debates with creationists because "what they seek is the oxygen of respectability", and doing so would "give them this oxygen by the mere act of engaging with them at all". He suggests 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." In a December 2004 interview with American journalist Bill Moyers, Dawkins said that "among the things that science does know, evolution is about as certain as anything we know." When Moyers questioned him on the use of the word theory, Dawkins stated that "evolution has been observed. It's just that it hasn't been observed while it's happening." He added that "it is rather like a detective coming on a murder after the scene... the detective hasn't actually seen the murder take place, of course. But what you do see is a massive clue... Huge quantities of circumstantial evidence. It might as well be spelled out in words of English."

Dawkins has opposed the inclusion of intelligent design in science education, describing it as "not a scientific argument at all, but a religious one". He has been referred to in the media as "Darwin's Rottweiler", a reference to English biologist T. H. Huxley, who was known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his advocacy of Charles Darwin's evolutionary ideas. He has been a strong critic of the British organisation Truth in Science, which promotes the teaching of creationism in state schools, and whose work Dawkins has described as an "educational scandal". He plans to subsidise schools through the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science with the delivery of books, DVDs, and pamphlets that counteract their work.

Political views

See also: Political views of Richard Dawkins

With Ariane Sherine at the Atheist Bus Campaign launch in London

Dawkins is an outspoken atheist and a supporter of various atheist, secular, and humanistic organisations, including Humanists UK and the Brights movement. Dawkins suggests that atheists should be proud, not apologetic, stressing that atheism is evidence of a healthy, independent mind. He hopes that the more atheists identify themselves, the more the public will become aware of just how many people are nonbelievers, thereby reducing the negative opinion of atheism among the religious majority. Inspired by the gay rights movement, he endorsed the Out Campaign to encourage atheists worldwide to declare their stance publicly. He supported a UK atheist advertising initiative, the Atheist Bus Campaign in 2008, which aimed to raise funds to place atheist advertisements on buses in the London area.

Speaking at Kepler's Books, Menlo Park, California, 29 October 2006

Dawkins discusses free speech and Islam(ism) at the 2017 Conference on Free Expression and Conscience

Dawkins has expressed concern about the growth of human population and about the matter of overpopulation. In The Selfish Gene, he briefly mentions population growth, giving the example of Latin America, whose population, at the time the book was written, was doubling every 40 years. 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 in the form of starvation.

As a supporter of the Great Ape Project—a movement to extend certain moral and legal rights to all great apes—Dawkins contributed the article 'Gaps in the Mind' to the Great Ape Project book edited by Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer. In this essay, he criticises contemporary society's moral attitudes as being based on a "discontinuous, speciesist imperative".

Dawkins also regularly comments in newspapers and blogs on contemporary political questions and is a frequent contributor to the online science and culture digest 3 Quarks Daily. His opinions include opposition to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the British nuclear deterrent, the actions of then-US President George W. Bush, and the ethics of designer babies. Several such articles were included in A Devil's Chaplain, an anthology of writings about science, religion, and politics. He is also a supporter of Republic's campaign to replace the British monarchy with a democratically elected president.

Dawkins has described himself as a Labour voter in the 1970s and In 2009 Dawkins participated in a New Statesman project called "20 ways to save Labour" where he among others gave suggestions about how to make the Labour Party better. Dawkins's contribution stated:

Stop toadying to Muslims and other "faith communities" as part of a general abolition of all religious privilege. Withdraw government support from schools that abuse children by teaching them they belong to a particular religion (as opposed to teaching them about religions and letting them make up their own minds when they are old enough). Abolish the automatic right of religious organizations to charitable status, and the automatic right of bishops to sit in the House of Lords.

He has been a voter for the Liberal Democrats since the party's creation. In 2009, he spoke at the party's conference in opposition to blasphemy laws, alternative medicine, and faith schools. In the UK general election of 2010, Dawkins officially endorsed the Liberal Democrats, in support of their campaign for electoral reform and for their "refusal to pander to 'faith'". In the run up to the 2017 general election, Dawkins once again endorsed the Liberal Democrats and urged voters to join the party.

In 1998, Dawkins expressed his appreciation for two books connected with the Sokal affair, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science by Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt and Intellectual Impostures by Sokal and Jean Bricmont. These books are famous for their criticism of postmodernism in US universities (namely in the departments of literary studies, anthropology, and other cultural studies).

Dawkins has voiced his support for the Campaign for the Establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, an organisation that campaigns for democratic reform in the United Nations, and the creation of a more accountable international political system.

Dawkins identifies as a feminist. Dawkins has said that feminism is "enormously important" and "a political movement that deserves to be supported".

Other fields

Jayce Lewis alongside Richard Dawkins at the Home of Dawkins working together on Jayce's album Million (Part 2), 2018

In his role as professor for public understanding of science, Dawkins has been a critic of pseudoscience and alternative medicine. His 1998 book Unweaving the Rainbow considers John Keats's accusation that by explaining the rainbow, Isaac Newton diminished its beauty; Dawkins argues for the opposite conclusion. He suggests that deep space, the billions of years of life's evolution, and the microscopic workings of biology and heredity contain more beauty and wonder than do "myths" and "pseudoscience". For John Diamond's posthumously published Snake Oil, a book devoted to debunking alternative medicine, Dawkins wrote a foreword in which he asserts that alternative medicine is harmful, if only because it distracts patients from more successful conventional treatments and gives people false hopes. Dawkins states that "There is no alternative medicine. There is only medicine that works and medicine that doesn't work." In his 2007 Channel 4 TV film The Enemies of Reason, Dawkins concluded that Britain is gripped by "an epidemic of superstitious thinking".

Continuing a long-standing partnership with Channel 4, Dawkins participated in a five-part television series, Genius of Britain, along with fellow scientists Stephen Hawking, James Dyson, Paul Nurse, and Jim Al-Khalili. The series was first broadcast in June 2010, and focuses on major, British, scientific achievements throughout history.

In 2014 he joined the global awareness movement Asteroid Day as a "100x Signatory".

Dawkins worked alongside Welsh Musician Jayce Lewis contributing a recorded spoken word for the track "Exhale" from his 1998 book Unweaving the Rainbow to the Welshman's third full-length album Million.

Controversy and Criticism

While is contribution to Science and rationalism cannot be doubted, Dawkins has attracted much criticism from fellow academics and philosophers as well as attracted much controversy in relation to some of his comments.

Criticism by scientists

A study of British Scientists by Rice University brought about heavy criticism of Dawkins. In an in-depth study of 137 British scientists 48 referenced Dawkins despite no questions being asked about him, 80% said they thought that Dawkins misrepresents science and scientists in his books and public speeches. Another common criticism was that Dawkins was too strong in his criticism of religion, one non religious biology professor described him as a “fundamental atheist' another said he was on a "crusade". However it should be noted 20% did mention him with positive views, owing to him challenging creationists and those who adhere to intelligent design. Paul Fidalgo, of the centre for inquiry, also challenged the saying that Dawkins has inspired millions and due to the size pool of the study this was understandable.

In 2014 biologist and Harvard University professor, E.O Wilson, criticised Dawkins on Newsnight calling him a Journalist and not a scientist.His comments are below:

“There is no dispute between me and Richard Dawkins and there never has been, because he’s a journalist, and journalists are people that report what the scientists have found and the arguments I’ve had have actually been with scientists doing research,”

He also went on to answer questions about his opinions on Dawkins' book the selfish gene, stating:

“I have abandoned it and I think most serious scientists working on it have abandoned it. Some defenders may be out there, but they have been relatively or almost totally silenced since our major paper came out.”

The paper he referred to was a 2010 study published in Nature entitled The evolution of eusociality. Dawkins attributed Wilson's comments to a disagreement over kin selection, later tweeting “I greatly admire EO Wilson & his huge contributions to entomology, ecology, biogeography, conservation, etc. He’s just wrong on kin selection.” He later elaborated referencing a critical Prospect Magazine review of Wilson’s book The Social Conquest of Earth.

Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist Peter Higgs and astrophysicist Martin Rees has equated Dawkins with the religious fundamentalists he criticises saying he has adopted "fundamentalist" view of non-atheists.

Other scientists have accused him of promoting Scientism, such as Dr Francis Collins the head of the National Institute of Health

Criticism by theologians and philosophers

Atheist philosophers such as Massimo Pigliucci, Michael Ruse and John Gray have criticised Dawkins. Their comments are below.

Ruse has that Dawkins would fail introductory courses on the study of philosophy or religion. He has also said that Dawkins and New Atheism does science a "grave disservice" and does a "disservice to scholarship" at more general level. Ruse then stated that The God Delusion made him 'ashamed to be an atheist'. Pigliucci has accused Dawkins and the leaders of the new atheism movement as adhering to scientism also saying, "I would actually go so far as to charge many of the leaders of the New Atheism movement (and, by implication, a good number of their followers) with anti-intellectualism, one mark of which is a lack of respect for the proper significance, value, and methods of another field of intellectual endeavor." Gray has denounced Dawkins as an "anti-religious missionary", whose assertions are "in no sense novel or original," suggesting that "transfixed in wonderment at the workings of his own mind, Dawkins misses much that is of importance in human beings." Gray has also criticised Dawkins's perceived allegiance to Darwin, stating that if "science, for Darwin, was a method of inquiry that enabled him to edge tentatively and humbly toward the truth, for Dawkins, science is an unquestioned view of the world."

The Conservative philosopher Rodger Scruton accused Dawkins of 'recycling' evolution as a theory for everything such as "what the human being is, what human communities are, what our problems are and then how they’re not really our problems, but the problems of our genes". Scruton has also that Dawkins cherry-picks his data, and ignores the benefits of religion.

Alister McGrath, the Anglican Priest and Theologian called him "embarrassingly ignorant of Christian theology". His book, The Dawkins Delusion? – a response to Dawkins's The God Delusion – was published by SPCK in February 2007. The author and writer Rupert Short blames Dawkins and New atheists for promoting ignorance, stating that they have peddled an idea that all people of faith share a Creationist view of the world. Writing in the Spectator he states:

Call out superstition by all means. But don’t display culpable ignorance by likening all manifestations of faith across the world to belief in the tooth fairy. Dawkins’s new book Outgrowing God is no less crude than his earlier diatribe The God Delusion. Once more, he’s lobbed a stone in a vain bid to hit the clouds.

In response to some of his critics, Dawkins maintains that theologians are no better than scientists in addressing deep cosmological questions and that he is not a fundamentalist, as he is willing to change his mind in the face of new evidence.

Comments on Rape and Harassment

While Dawkins has said that feminism is "enormously important" he has still come under fire for some comments he has made.

IN 2014 Dawkins was accused of victim blaming, tweeting - "If you want to be in a position to testify & jail a man, don't get drunk," Amanda Marcotte, in Salon, criticized Dawkins by saying that "For someone who is a supposed rationalist, Dawkins refused to even acknowledge the basic difference between making the choice to break the law and being the victim of a crime." In Vice News, in an article titled, The Atheist Movement Needs to Disown Richard Dawkins, Allegra Ringo writes he buys into a 'frat-boy mentality and he 'plays by his own God-free rules'. Dawkins was also the subject of another rape controversy when he tweeted, "Date rape is bad. Stranger rape at knifepoint is worse. If you think that's an endorsement of date rape, go away and learn how to think." Amanda Marcotte criticised this by saying that "He made a pretty serious logical error…He assumed that the amount of pain that a victim of injustice suffers is directly proportional to the contemporary social norms surrounding it, i.e. if a form of abuse was considered no big deal to most people in a society, the people directly victimised would also feel that way."

Rebecca Watson incident

Dawkins was denounced for his comments about a video blog post by atheist blogger and writer Rebecca Watson, an atheist blogger who was harassed at a convention in Dublin. When Watson was in an elevator, she was propositioned by a man, who said "Don't take this the wrong way, but I find you very interesting, and I would like to talk more. Would you like to come to my hotel room for coffee?" Watson found this extremely inappropriate and later creating a post where she said "guys, don't do that." PZ Myers made a reactionary post. On that post, Dawkins contrasted the "elevator incident" with the plight of women in Islamic countries in a surprising post.

Dear Muslima

Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and ... yawn ... don't tell me yet again, I know you aren't allowed to drive a car, and you can't leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you'll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.

Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself Skep"chick", and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee. I am not exaggerating. He really did. He invited her back to his room for coffee. Of course she said no, and of course he didn't lay a finger on her, but even so ...

And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about! For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.

Richard Dawkins

Dawkins was criticized by atheists, feminist groups and other for his remarks. David Allen Green in New Statesman wrote that "One of the many problems here is that Rebecca didn't use her video to downplay the plight of Muslim women from the perspective of an American woman…Just because there is severe misogyny in one context doesn't remove the need to deal rationally and helpfully with its lesser manifestation in other contexts." PZ Myers responded by writing, "This isn't slightly bad. It's very bad. Atheist men are alienating the people we want to work with us on the very same problems…that you cited in your comment." After trying to clarify his argument:

The man in the elevator didn't physically touch her, didn't attempt to bar her way out of the elevator, didn't even use foul language at her […] [Rebecca] was probably offended to about the same extent as I am offended if a man gets into an elevator with me chewing gum.

Watson herself issued the following boycott of Dawkins as a response to his posts:

[Richard Dawkins] will no longer be rewarded with my money, my praise, my attention. I will no longer recommend his books to others, buy them as presents, or buy them for my own library. I will not attend his lectures or recommend that others do the same.

The incident was labelled "Elevatorgate"

Accusations of Islamophobia

Many have accused Dawkins of Islamophobia However Dawkins has responded saying he is a frequent critic of Christianity and Islam does not get a 'free pass'. However he has also described Islam as more problematic than Christianity. He as also maintained that he is critical of "the appalling misogyny and homophobia of Islam, I have criticised the murdering of apostates for no crime other than their disbelief", he is only critical of these practices and beliefs and thus is far from attacking muslims.

Dawkins generated controversy when he tweeted "All the world's Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though." These comments generated controversy. Defending himself he went on to say:

"You can attack someone for his opinion. But for simply stating an intriguing fact? Who would guess that a single Cambridge College" and "Muslims aren't a race. What they have in common is a religion. Rather than Trinity, would you prefer the comparison with Jews? Google it."

Owen Jones commented, "How dare you dress your bigotry up as atheism. You are now beyond an embarrassment." Critics have also hit out at comments he made on twitter saying

Of course you can have an opinion about Islam without having read Qur'an. You don't have to read Mein Kampf to have an opinion about Nazism."

Dawkins has also stated that "Islam is the greatest force for evil in the world today", generating further controversy and accusations of Islamophobia. He did however state that these comments were in reference to Islamism. Other tweets occurred when at a debate at University College London when a Muslim speaker tried to segregate the sexes causing much controversy however Abby Ohlheiser writes in the Atlantic that 'Dawkins's response probably gained more attention than the incident itself:

'Who the hell do these Muslims think they are? At UCL of all places, tried to segregate the sexes in debate between @LKrauss1 and a Muslim.' and 'How has UCL come to this: cowardly capitulation to Muslims? Tried to segregate sexes in debate between @LKrauss1 and some Muslim or other.'

His comments generated controversy, Dawkins mocked those who were calling him racist stating all he believe is that Muslims should not segregate the sexes.

Dawkins also commented on the short film Fitna, saying "Geert Wilders, if it should turn out that you are a racist or a gratuitous stirrer and provocateur I withdraw my respect, but on the strength of Fitna alone I salute you as a man of courage, who has the balls to stand up to a monstrous enemy."The film created an international uproar, many saying it made Islam out to be the same as Islamism.

Awards and recognition

Receiving the Deschner Prize in Frankfurt, 12 October 2007, from Karlheinz Deschner

Dawkins was awarded a Doctor of Science degree by the University of Oxford in 1989. He holds honorary doctorates in science from the University of Huddersfield, University of Westminster, Durham University, the University of Hull, the University of Antwerp, the University of Oslo, the University of Aberdeen, Open University, the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and the University of Valencia. He also holds honorary doctorates of letters from the University of St Andrews and the Australian National University (HonLittD, 1996), and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1997 and a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2001. He is one of the patrons of the Oxford University Scientific Society.

In 1987, Dawkins received a Royal Society of Literature award and a Los Angeles Times Literary Prize for his book The Blind Watchmaker. In the same year, he received a Sci. Tech Prize for Best Television Documentary Science Programme of the Year for his work on the BBC's Horizon episode The Blind Watchmaker.

Other awards include the Zoological Society of London's Silver Medal (1989), the Finlay Innovation Award (1990), the Michael Faraday Award (1990), the Nakayama Prize (1994), the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year Award (1996), the fifth International Cosmos Prize (1997), the Kistler Prize (2001), the Medal of the Presidency of the Italian Republic (2001), the 2001 and 2012 Emperor Has No Clothes Award from the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the Bicentennial Kelvin Medal of The Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow (2002), and the Nierenberg Prize for Science in the Public Interest (2009). He was awarded the Deschner Award, named after German anti-clerical author Karlheinz Deschner. The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSICOP) has awarded Dawkins their highest award In Praise of Reason (1992).

Dawkins accepting the Services to Humanism award at the British Humanist Association Annual Conference in 2012

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. He was shortlisted as a candidate in their 2008 follow-up poll. In a poll held by Prospect in 2013, Dawkins was voted the world's top thinker based on 65 names chosen by a largely US and UK-based expert panel.

In 2005, the Hamburg-based Alfred Toepfer Foundation awarded him its Shakespeare Prize in recognition of his "concise and accessible presentation of scientific knowledge". He won the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science for 2006, as well as the Galaxy British Book Awards's Author of the Year Award for 2007. In the same year, he was listed by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2007, and was ranked 20th in The Daily Telegraph's 2007 list of 100 greatest living geniuses.

Since 2003, the Atheist Alliance International has awarded a prize during its annual conference, honouring an outstanding atheist whose work has done the most to raise public awareness of atheism during that year; it is known as the Richard Dawkins Award, in honour of Dawkins's own efforts. In February 2010, Dawkins was named to the Freedom From Religion Foundation's Honorary Board of distinguished achievers.

In 2012, ichthyologists in Sri Lanka honored Dawkins by creating Dawkinsia as a new genus name (members of this genus were formerly members of the genus Puntius). Explaining the reasoning behind the genus name, lead researcher Rohan Pethiyagoda was quoted as stating, "Richard Dawkins has, through his writings, helped us understand that the universe is far more beautiful and awe-inspiring than any religion has imagined [...]. We hope that Dawkinsia will serve as a reminder of the elegance and simplicity of evolution, the only rational explanation there is for the unimaginable diversity of life on Earth.

Personal life

Dawkins has been married three times, and has one daughter. On 19 August 1967, Dawkins married fellow ethologist Marian Stamp in the Protestant church in Annestown, County Waterford, Ireland; they divorced in 1984. On 1 June 1984, he married Eve Barham (1951–1999) in Oxford. They had a daughter, Juliet Emma Dawkins (born 1984, Oxford). Dawkins and Barham divorced. In 1992, he married actress Lalla Ward in Kensington and Chelsea, London. Dawkins met her through their mutual friend Douglas Adams, who had worked with her on the BBC's Doctor Who. Dawkins and Ward separated in 2016 and they later described the separation as "entirely amicable".

On 6 February 2016, Dawkins suffered a minor hemorrhagic stroke while at home. Dawkins reported later that same year that he had almost completely recovered.

Media

Selected publications

Main article: Richard Dawkins bibliography

• The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1976. ISBN 978-0-19-286092-7.
• The Extended Phenotype. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1982. ISBN 978-0-19-288051-2.
• The Blind Watchmaker. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 1986. ISBN 978-0-393-31570-7.
• River Out of Eden. New York: Basic Books. 1995. ISBN 978-0-465-06990-3. Book text
• Climbing Mount Improbable. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 1996. ISBN 978-0-393-31682-7.
• Unweaving the Rainbow. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 1998. ISBN 978-0-618-05673-6.
• A Devil's Chaplain. Weidenfeld & Nicolson (United Kingdom and Commonwealth), Houghton Mifflin (United States). 2003. ISBN 978-0753817506.
• The Ancestor's Tale. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 2004. ISBN 978-0-618-00583-3.
• The God Delusion. Bantam Press (United Kingdom), Houghton Mifflin (United States). 2006. ISBN 978-0-618-68000-9.
• The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. Transworld (United Kingdom and Commonwealth), Free Press (United States). 2009. ISBN 978-0-593-06173-2.
• The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True. Bantam Press (United Kingdom), Free Press (United States). 2011. ISBN 978-1-4391-9281-8. OCLC 709673132.
• An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist. Bantam Press (United Kingdom and United States). 2013. ISBN 978-0-06-228715-1.
• Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science. Bantam Press (United Kingdom and United States). 2015. ISBN 978-0062288431.
• Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist. Random House. 2017. ISBN 978-1-4735-4166-5.
• Outgrowing God: A Beginner's Guide. Random House. 2019. ISBN 978-1984853912.

Documentary films

• Nice Guys Finish First (1986)
• The Blind Watchmaker (1987)
• Growing Up in the Universe (1991)
• Break the Science Barrier (1996)
• The Atheism Tapes (2004)
• The Big Question (2005) – Part 3 of the TV series, titled "Why Are We Here?"
• The Root of All Evil? (2006)
• The Enemies of Reason (2007)
• The Genius of Charles Darwin (2008)
• The Purpose of Purpose (2009) – Lecture tour among American universities
• Faith School Menace? (2010)
• Beautiful Minds (April 2012) – BBC4 documentary
• Sex, Death and the Meaning of Life (2012)
• The Unbelievers (2013)

Other appearances

Dawkins has made many television appearances on news shows providing his political opinions and especially his views as an atheist. He has been interviewed on the radio, often as part of his book tours. He has debated many religious figures. He has made many university speaking appearances, again often in coordination with his book tours. As of 2016, he has over 60 credits in the Internet Movie Database where he appeared as himself.

• Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (2008) – as himself, presented as a leading scientific opponent of intelligent design in a film that contends that the mainstream science establishment suppresses academics who believe they see evidence of intelligent design in nature and who criticise evidence supporting Darwinian evolution
• Doctor Who: "The Stolen Earth" (2008) – as himself
• The Simpsons: "Black Eyed, Please" (2013) – appears in Ned Flanders' dream of Hell; provided voice as a demon version of himself
• Endless Forms Most Beautiful (2015) – by Nightwish: Finnish symphonic metal band Nightwish had Dawkins as a guest star on the album. He provides narration on two tracks: "Shudder Before the Beautiful", in which he opens the album with one of his own quotes, and "The Greatest Show on Earth", inspired by and named after his book The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, and in which he quotes On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. He subsequently performed his parts live with Nightwish on 19 December 2015 at the Wembley Arena in London; the concert was later released as a part of a live album/DVD titled Vehicle of Spirit.

Notes

a. ^{^} W. D. Hamilton influenced Dawkins and the influence can be seen throughout Dawkins's book The Selfish Gene. They became friends at Oxford and following Hamilton's death in 2000, Dawkins wrote his obituary and organised a secular memorial service.

b. ^{^} The debate ended with the motion "That the doctrine of creation is more valid than the theory of evolution" being defeated by 198 votes to 115.

References

Cited texts

• Dawkins, Richard (1989). The Selfish Gene (2nd ed.). United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-286092-7.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)
• Dawkins, Richard (2006). The God Delusion. Transworld Publishers. ISBN 978-0-593-05548-9.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)
• Dawkins, Richard (2003). A Devil's Chaplain. Weidenfeld & Nicolson (United Kingdom and Commonwealth), Houghton Mifflin (United States). ISBN 978-0753817506.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)
• Dawkins, Richard (2015). Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science. Bantam Press. ISBN 978-0-59307-256-1.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)
• Grafen, Alan; Ridley, Mark (2006). Richard Dawkins: How A Scientist Changed the Way We Think. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-929116-8.

External links

• Official website  – The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science
• Richard Dawkins at IMDb
• Richard Dawkins at TED
• Richard Dawkins on Charlie Rose
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• Richard Dawkins collected news and commentary at The Guardian
• Richard Dawkins – lasted news at The Independent
• Richard Dawkins at The New York Times
• Richard Dawkins at Big Think