Richard Dawkins

Clinton Richard Dawkins was born on March 26, 1941, in Nairobi, in what was then the British colony of Kenya. His father, Clinton John Dawkins, worked in the colonial agricultural service in Nyasaland (now Malawi) and had been called up to the King's African Rifles during the Second World War, which is why the family found itself in East Africa at the time of Richard's birth ^[1]. Both parents took a keen interest in natural history, and the boy grew up surrounded by informal lessons about plants, animals and the names of things.

The family returned to England in 1949, when Richard was eight, after his father inherited a farming estate at Over Norton in Oxfordshire ^[1]. Dawkins attended Oundle School in Northamptonshire, a boarding school with an Anglican character. He was raised in a conventionally Christian household and, by his own account, accepted religion without much thought as a child before doubts set in during adolescence, when he concluded that evolution offered a better explanation for the apparent design of living things ^[2].

In 1959 he went up to Balliol College, Oxford, to read zoology. There he came under the influence of the Dutch-born ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen, who would later share a Nobel Prize for his work on animal behavior. Dawkins took his bachelor's degree in 1962 and stayed on to complete a doctorate under Tinbergen's supervision, studying decision-making in the pecking behavior of chicks ^[3]. That training in ethology, the study of animal behavior in its natural context, shaped everything he wrote afterward.

After finishing his DPhil in 1966, Dawkins crossed the Atlantic to become an assistant professor of zoology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he remained for two years during a period of intense campus protest against the Vietnam War ^[3]. He returned to Oxford in 1970 as a lecturer in zoology and a fellow of New College, positions he held for the next quarter century.

The turning point of his career, and a fair answer to anyone asking who was Richard Dawkins before fame, came in 1976 with the publication of The Selfish Gene ^[4]. The book argued that natural selection is best understood as acting on genes rather than on individuals or groups: organisms, in this view, are survival machines built by genes to copy themselves into future generations. Dawkins drew heavily on the theoretical work of W. D. Hamilton, George C. Williams, John Maynard Smith and Robert Trivers, but he synthesized their ideas into prose that ordinary readers could follow and enjoy ^[4].

The Selfish Gene also introduced the word meme, Dawkins's coinage for a unit of cultural transmission analogous to the gene, an idea that has since escaped into everyday language in ways he could not have predicted ^[4]. The book sold in the millions, was translated into dozens of languages, and in 2017 was voted the most influential science book of all time in a poll run by the Royal Society ^[5]. He followed it in 1982 with The Extended Phenotype, a more technical work he has often described as his most important contribution to biology, which argued that a gene's effects reach beyond the body that carries it, into structures such as beaver dams and bird nests ^[3].

Any list of Richard Dawkins achievements has to begin with his books. The Blind Watchmaker (1986) tackled the old argument from design head on, explaining how cumulative natural selection can produce complex adaptations without any designer, and it won the Royal Society of Literature Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize ^[2]. River Out of Eden (1995), Climbing Mount Improbable (1996), Unweaving the Rainbow (1998) and The Ancestor's Tale (2004) extended his project of making evolutionary biology vivid for general readers ^[3].

In 1995 the technologist and philanthropist Charles Simonyi endowed a new chair at Oxford, the Simonyi Professorship for the Public Understanding of Science, created with Dawkins in mind as its first holder ^[6]. He occupied the post until his retirement in 2008, using it to write, lecture and broadcast on science, and he delivered the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures for children in 1991, televised under the title Growing Up in the Universe ^[3].

His honors include fellowship of the Royal Society, to which he was elected in 2001, and fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature, elected in 1997, a rare double distinction ^[6]. He received the Royal Society's Michael Faraday Prize in 1990 for excellence in communicating science, the International Cosmos Prize in 1997, and the Nierenberg Prize for Science in the Public Interest in 2009 ^[3]. In 2006 he published The God Delusion, a sustained argument against religious belief that sold millions of copies worldwide and made him, alongside Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens, a leading figure in the movement journalists labeled the New Atheism ^[7]. That same year he founded the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, a charity promoting scientific education and secularism ^[7].

Dawkins has been married three times. His first wife was the ethologist Marian Stamp, a fellow student of Tinbergen whom he married in 1967; the marriage ended in divorce in 1984, and Marian Stamp Dawkins went on to a distinguished Oxford career in animal welfare science ^[1]. In 1984 he married Eve Barham, with whom he had his only child, a daughter, Juliet Emma Dawkins, born that year; that marriage also ended in divorce. Juliet later became a doctor ^[1].

In 1992 he married the actress Lalla Ward, known to television audiences for playing Romana in Doctor Who. They had been introduced by their mutual friend Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, whose humanist funeral eulogy Dawkins later delivered. Ward illustrated several of his books before the couple separated in 2016 ^[1].

Away from biology, Dawkins is a longtime enthusiast of computer programming, having written his own simulation software for The Blind Watchmaker, and he has often described his aesthetic sense of wonder at nature as a kind of secular spirituality, a theme he explored in Unweaving the Rainbow ^[2]. He published two volumes of memoir, An Appetite for Wonder in 2013 and Brief Candle in the Dark in 2015, which together give the fullest account of his life in his own words ^[1].

Retirement from the Simonyi chair in 2008 did not slow his output. The Greatest Show on Earth (2009) laid out the evidence for evolution for readers confronted with creationist claims, and The Magic of Reality (2011), illustrated by Dave McKean, brought scientific explanation to younger audiences ^[3]. Later titles include Science in the Soul (2017), Outgrowing God (2019) and Flights of Fancy (2021), on the evolution of flight.

He became a prolific and sometimes combative presence on social media, where his blunt remarks on religion and other topics drew regular controversy, and in 2021 the American Humanist Association withdrew an award it had given him in 1996 after comments he made about gender identity, a decision he publicly contested ^[7]. In February 2016 he suffered a minor stroke, from which he reported a good recovery, and he has continued to write, debate and tour internationally since ^[7].

Among the milder curiosities in any collection of Richard Dawkins facts: a genus of fish, Dawkinsia, was named in his honor in 2012 by the ichthyologists Rohan Pethiyagoda and colleagues, in recognition of his contributions to the public understanding of evolution ^[3].

Any serious Richard Dawkins biography ends up weighing two intertwined legacies, one scientific and one cultural. Within biology, his gene-centered framing of selection, popularized in The Selfish Gene and sharpened in The Extended Phenotype, gave a generation of students and researchers a common language for thinking about adaptation, kin selection and cooperation ^[4]. Critics, most famously Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, accused the approach of overstating the gene's role, and the resulting debates over units of selection ran through evolutionary theory for decades ^[2].

As a writer, he set a standard for scientific prose that many have tried to match. The Royal Society poll that ranked The Selfish Gene above Darwin's On the Origin of Species as the most influential science book ever written says less about the two books' relative merits than about how deeply Dawkins's work penetrated the reading public ^[5]. The word meme, now attached to internet jokes he never envisioned, is a strange but genuine measure of that reach.

His campaigning atheism divides opinion more sharply. Admirers credit The God Delusion with making unbelief speakable in public life; detractors, including some fellow scientists and secularists, argue that his polemical style alienated potential allies ^[7]. What is not in dispute is his influence: for readers around the world, Dawkins has been the writer who first made the logic of evolution feel both rigorous and thrilling, and that is likely to remain the core of his reputation.