Richard Dawkins FRS

FRSL, Emeritus Fellow

New College, Oxford, United  Kingdom

Profile – Richard Dawkins (b. 1941)

Born in Nairobi, Dawkins came to England with his family in 1949. He studied at the University of Oxford, where he subsequently became Lecturer in Zoology, Fellow of New College, and then Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science until his retirement in 2008. His first book, The Selfish Gene (1976), established what came to be called ‘selfish gene theory’, and was a bestseller for many decades. As a protagonist in the ‘Darwin Wars’, he battled against Stephen Jay Gould over the importance of natural selection and adaptation in evolution (Brown, 1999; Sterelny, 2001). His book The God Delusion (2007) inspired ‘the new atheism’, a movement against religious dogma and indoctrination whose main proponents, including Dawkins, were dubbed ‘The four horsemen’. He describes human beings as mere ‘survival machines’ – the ‘lumbering robots’ designed to carry our genes around. In promoting ‘Universal Darwinism’ he invented the concept of the meme as a cultural replicator, and refers to religions as viruses of the mind. As for consciousness, he thinks it is ‘the most profound mystery facing modern biology’.