Richard Dawkins is the former Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, a position he held from 1995-2008. A well known biologist and atheist, he's known for his selfish gene theory, his staunch defence of evolution through natural selection and his vocal support of atheism. Among his books are The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable, Unweaving the Rainbow and The God Delusion.
Born in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1941, Professor Richard Dawkins is one of the world’s leading scientific intellectuals, specialising in evolutionary biology. After undertaking his doctorate under the instruction of Nobel-prize winning ethologist Niko Tinbergen at Berkeley University of California, in 1967 he was appointed Assistant Professor of Zoology at Berkeley Dawkins returned to Oxford University, where he gained his degree, before becoming a fellow at New College, Oxford in 1970.
Professor Dawkins is an enormously successful writer. His first book, The Blind Watchmaker, published in 1976, was a huge success and has since been translated into 13 languages worldwide. His other books include: The Extended Phenotype (1982), The Selfish Gene (1989), River Our of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (1995), Climbing Mount Improbable (1996), Unweaving the Rainbow (1997), A Devil’s Chaplain (2003), The Ancestor’s Tale (2004) and The God Delusion (2006).
He has won countless awards and regularly lectures around the world. He widely accredits Charles Darwin as having a profound influence on his life and work, commenting in an interview with The National Geographic Channel Online that Darwin was “the founder of really everything that I do…whereas some people make a discovery and they stumble upon it, Darwin devoted himself to making his theory clear, to listing all the evidence and spending decades of his life gathering the evidence so no one could doubt it.”
