Richard Dawkins (naval Officer)

Richard Dawkins (born 26 March 1941) is a British evolutionary biologist, zoologist, science communicator and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford from 1995 to 2008, and is on the advisory board of the University of Austin. His book ''The Selfish Gene'' (1976) popularised the gene-centred view of evolution and coined the word ''meme''. Dawkins has won several academic and writing awards.

A vocal atheist, Dawkins is known for his criticism of creationism and intelligent design. He wrote ''The Blind Watchmaker'' (1986), in which he argues against the watchmaker analogy, an argument for the existence of a creator deity based upon the complexity of living organisms. Instead, he describes evolutionary processes as analogous to a ''blind'' watchmaker, in that reproduction, mutation, and natural selection are unguided by any sentient designer. In his book ''The God Delusion'' (2006) he argues that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and calls religious faith a delusion. He founded the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science in 2006. Dawkins has published two volumes of memoirs, '' An Appetite for Wonder'' (2013) and '' Brief Candle in the Dark'' (2015).

Background

Early life

Dawkins was born Clinton Richard Dawkins on 26 March 1941 in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya during British colonial rule. He 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 a landed gentry family from Oxfordshire. His father was called up into the King's African Rifles during the Second World War 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 lives in Oxford. He has a younger sister, Sarah.

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 alone was a better explanation for life's complexity, and ceased believing in the Christian God. He 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". This understanding of atheism, combined with his Western cultural background, influences Dawkins as he describes himself in several interviews as a "cultural Christian" and a "cultural Anglican" in 2007, 2013 and 2024.

Education

On his arrival in England from Nyasaland in 1949, at the age of eight, Dawkins joined Chafyn Grove School, in Wiltshire, where he says he was molested by a teacher. From 1954 to 1959, he 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 (the same college his father attended), graduating in 1962; while there, he was tutored by Nikolaas Tinbergen, a Nobel Prize-winning ethologist. He graduated with a second-class degree.

Dawkins continued as a research student under Tinbergen's supervision, receiving his Doctor of Philosophy degree by 1966, and remained a research assistant for another year. For direct link to media, se
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/ref> 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 Sheldon Doyle Lecture (1999), 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 an 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 such 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 the philosopher A. C. Grayling, which opened in September 2012.

Dawkins announced his final speaking tour would take place in the autumn of 2024.

Work

Evolutionary biology

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 two of 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 Stephen Jay Gould and Richard 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.

Altruism appears at first to be an evolutionary paradox, since helping others costs precious resources and decreases one's own chances for survival, or fitness. Previously, many had interpreted altruism as an aspect of group selection, suggesting that individuals are doing what is best for the survival of the population or species as a whole. The 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. Hamilton's inclusive fitness has since been successfully applied to a wide range of organisms, including humans. Similarly, the evolutionary biologist 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 his 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 the biologist 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. Besides, other, more recent views and analysis on his popular science works also exist.

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 influences 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.

"Meme" as behavioural concept

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 said 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 stating that neural memory traces were added "upon the individual mneme". Nonetheless, the author 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

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 organisation’s board of directors.

Criticism of religion

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 says that some physicists use 'God' as a metaphor for the general awe-inspiring mysteries of the universe, which he says 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.

Dawkins 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 ranges from 1 (100 per cent certainty that a God or gods exist) to 7 (100 per cent 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 criticised 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 Adam-ondi-Ahman in the U.S. state of 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 bestseller. As of 2015, more than three million copies have been sold, and the book has been translated into more than 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, titled "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 in Washington, D.C. for a private, unmoderated discussion that lasted two hours. It was recorded 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.

While some critics, such as his friend the writer Christopher Hitchens, the psychologist Steven Pinker and the Nobel Prize laureates Sir Harold Kroto, James D. Watson and Steven Weinberg have defended Dawkins's stance on religion and praised his work, others, including the Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist Peter Higgs, the astrophysicist Martin Rees