Foreign thinker
Richard Dawkins
Richard DawkinsEvolutionary BiologyBritishb. 1941
'We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.'
Life and Thought
Richard Dawkins (born 1941) is an evolutionary biologist, author, and former professor at the University of Oxford, world-renowned for his gene-centered explanation of evolution and outspoken criticism of religion. By introducing the concept of the 'meme' in *The Selfish Gene* and writing the controversial *The God Delusion*, he has played a prominent role in promoting science and the New Atheism movement.
Richard Dawkins was born in 1941 in Nairobi, Kenya, and returned to Britain with his family at the age of eight. He studied biology at the University of Oxford and received his doctorate under the supervision of Nikolaas Tinbergen, the Nobel laureate and one of the founders of animal ethology. After a period of teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, he returned to Oxford and for many years held the Simonyi Professorship for the Public Understanding of Science at the university.
Dawkins's fame began with the publication of *The Selfish Gene* (1976), a work that proposed a gene-centered view of evolution and argued that natural selection operates at the level of genes, not organisms or species. In this book, he also introduced the concept of the 'meme' as a unit of human cultural transmission, which has become a key concept in contemporary cultural studies. In his other major work, *The Blind Watchmaker* (1986), he launched a strong critique of the argument from design for the existence of God and explained how the purposeless process of natural selection can shape the complexities of life.
In 2006, Dawkins published *The God Delusion*, which, with millions of copies sold worldwide, became one of the most influential contemporary books criticizing religion and established him, alongside figures like Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett, as one of the 'Four Horsemen of New Atheism.' In addition to his research activities and writing popular science books, through the establishment of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, he focuses on teaching critical thinking, promoting rationality, and combating superstition.
