CANR
WORK TITLE: OUTGROWING GOD
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WEBSITE: http://richarddawkins.net/
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NATIONALITY: British
LAST VOLUME: CANR 310
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/sep/05/richard-dawkins-greatest-show-evolution http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-greatest-show-on-earth-by-richard-dawkins-1789023.html http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/books/review/Wade-t.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born March 26, 1941, in Nairobi, Kenya; moved to England, 1949; son of Clinton John (a farmer and British civil servant) and Jean Mary Vyvyan Dawkins; married Marian Stamp, August 19, 1967 (divorced, 1984); married Eve Barham, June 1, 1984 (marriage ended); married Lalla Ward (an actor and artist), 1992; children: Juliet Emma.
EDUCATION:Balliol College, Oxford, B.A., 1962, M.A., 1966, D.Phil., 1966.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Zoologist, educator. University of California, Berkeley, assistant professor of zoology, 1967-69; Oxford University, Oxford, England, lecturer in zoology and fellow of New College, 1970-90, reader in zoology, 1990-95, Charles Simonyi Professor in the Public Understanding of Science, 1995-2008, emeritus fellow of New College; Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, founder, 2006.
AVOCATIONS:Computer programming.
MEMBER:Royal Society of London (fellow), Royal Society of Literature (fellow), British Humanist Association (vice president, 1996—).
AWARDS:Royal Society of Literature Prize, 1987, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize in current interest, 1987, both for The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design; Silver Medal, Zoological Society of London, 1979; Michael Faraday Award, Royal Society of London, 1990; Nakayama Prize for Human Sciences, 1994; D.Litt., University of St. Andrews, 1995; International Cosmos Prize, 1997; Royal Society of Literature fellowship, 1997; Kistler Prize, 2001; Richard Dawkins Award established in his honor, 2003; ranked number one of top 100 British public intellectuals list, Prospect magazine, 2004; Author of the Year award, Galaxy British Book Awards, 2007, for The God Delusion; Deschner Prize, 2007; Nierenberg Prize for Science in the Public Interest, 2009.
WRITINGS
Honorary editor of Animal Behaviour, 1974—; contributing blogger to Huffington Post, 2005—.
SIDELIGHTS
Richard Dawkins was the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University from 1995 to 2008 and is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford. A respected zoologist and ethologist, Dawkins has “established himself as a biological guru” with his books detailing and expanding upon Darwinian theory, according to Times Literary Supplement contributor Stephen R.L. Clark. Seeing a decline in the popular acceptance of Darwin’s theories by the turn of the twenty-first century, Dawkins “has been concerned to convince the literate public that they must now take evolutionary theory seriously as the context within which to think about ourselves and the world,” wrote Clark. Dawkins involved himself in internal debates with fellow proponents of evolutionary theory, and he acted as a firebrand in the more public debate regarding atheism versus religion.
With his 1976 work, The Selfish Gene, Dawkins introduced the term “meme,” indicating a unit of evolutionary imitation and transmission similar to a gene, which he claims is the engine of evolution. He thus became a spokesperson for a sociobiological theory of evolution, in contrast to more traditional Darwinians such as Stephen Jay Gould. Dawkins has extended his arguments in subsequent works, such as The Extended Phenotype: The Gene as the Unit of Selection, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design, Climbing Mount Improbable, The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist, and Outgrowing God: A Beginner’s Guide.
Dawkins has also become the defender of atheism in what he sees as an increasingly religious world. Gordy Black asserted on Salon.com: “Dawkins is the world’s most famous out-of-the-closet living atheist. He is also the world’s most controversial evolutionary biologist.” Black went on to note: “Given his outspoken defense of Darwin, and natural selection as the force of life, Dawkins has assumed a new role: the religious right’s Public Enemy No. 1.” Similarly, Jim Holt, writing for the Slate website, called Dawkins a “champion of Darwinism and scourge of religion.” Although some critics consider his theoretical explanations technical and involved, Dawkins strives to bring his theories to an audience of lay readers through comprehensible analogies and clear writing.
In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins “gently and expertly debunks some of the favourite illusions of social biology about altruism,” wrote Peter Medawar in Spectator. Medawar also remarked that the work is “a most skillful reformulation of the central problems of social biology in terms of the genetical theory of natural selection.” “Building on a beautifully chosen set of analogies,” wrote Douglas R. Hofstadter in the Washington Post Book World, “Dawkins shows how, in the end, spectacularly complex organizations can have the properties we attribute to ourselves, all as a consequence of aimless chemical reactions.” Hofstadter further noted: “This is one of the coldest, most inhuman and disorienting views of human beings I have ever heard, and yet I love it! It is so deep an insight, to bridge the gap between the lifeless and the living, the chemical and the biological, the random and the teleological, the physical and the spiritual.”
John Pfeiffer found the significance of Dawkins’s evolutionary theories elusive: “Dawkins is somewhat ambiguous when it comes to considering how all this applies to human beings,” Pfeiffer wrote in the New York Times Book Review, adding that the author is “perhaps swayed by his own eloquence.” Conversely, New York Times critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt thought Dawkins’s writing more than adequate to his task: “It is not the theory of The Selfish Gene that is so arresting as the marvelous lucidity with which Mr. Dawkins applies it to various behavior mechanisms that have hitherto been misunderstood.” Pfeiffer also admitted that Dawkins “demonstrates a rare and welcome ability to make formidably technical findings come alive.” A New Yorker reviewer expressed a similar opinion: “What makes [ The Selfish Gene ] accessible is the brilliance and wit of Mr. Dawkins’ style. It is a splendid example of how difficult scientific ideas can be explained by someone who understands them and is willing to take the trouble.”
Of The Extended Phenotype, Dawkins once told CA: “I suppose most authors have one piece of work of which they would say, ‘It doesn’t matter if you never read anything else of mine, please at least read this.’ For me, it is The Extended Phenotype. In particular, the last four chapters constitute the best candidate for the title ‘innovative’ that I have to offer. The rest of the book does some necessary sorting out on the way.”
Dawkins once again investigates aspects of Darwinian theory in The Blind Watchmaker. Lee Dembart, writing in the Los Angeles Times, called the work “a clear, logical, rational book that is the antidote to silliness.” Dawkins “cuts through the nonsense about the origin and development of life and leaves it for dead,” continued Dembart. “He demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt that evolution is the only possible explanation for the world we see around us.” In this work, Dawkins rebuts the argument that the complexity of life cannot be random, thus implying a designer or creator. The author uses Darwin’s idea of small mutational variation to “demonstrate that it (and it alone) is competent to explain the enormous diversity of living things in all their extremes of complexity and specialization,” wrote David Jones in the London Times. Jones found that The Blind Watchmaker, like the author’s previous work, “is brilliant exposition, tightly argued but kept readable by plentiful recourse to analogies and examples.”
Because of its controversial topic and method of exposition, The Blind Watchmaker inevitably drew its share of criticism. Steven Rose, writing in the New Statesman, found the author’s work self-contradictory: “There is much which is good and not merely clever about this book. But Dawkins’s greatest problem is his continual tendency to allow himself to be dragged over the top by the very vigour of his own writing.” While Dawkins “provides an excellent account of why and how reductionism fails,” remarked Rose, “he can’t resist beginning a chapter … [with] beautiful and fallacious writing, not only profoundly reductionist, but, as he would himself put it, ‘deeply superficial.’” In his review of the work for the Times Literary Supplement, Stephen R.L. Clark not only disputed Dawkins’s methods, he argued against his theory as well, claiming that the work lacks “any argument for the claim that the god of hard metaphysical theism either is or ought to be conceived as something inordinately complex.” The critic continued: “Dawkins cannot simply ignore theological and philosophical discussion of what it would mean to speak of God’s design, or God’s existence.”
While Clark disagreed with many of Dawkins’s theories and faulted the author for omitting what he believed were important considerations, he still concluded that the book works on a specific level. “What Dawkins does successfully is very good: The Blind Watchmaker is as clear, as enthralling, as convincing an account of neo-Darwinian theory as I have read. … His opposition to dogmatic vivisectionists and his appreciation of the marvellous diversity and ingenuity of the world are very welcome.” Dembart summarized his own impression of the work: “The book is beautifully and superbly written. It is completely understandable, but it has the cadence of impassioned speech. Every page rings of truth.” The same critic continued: “It is one of the best science books—one of the best any books—I have ever read.” Explaining the origin of this “passion” for truth, Dawkins remarked to Sarah Duncan in the London Times that his “early interest in evolution was really as a sort of alternative to religion, and an explanation for the way things are.” Dawkins further noted that while “other biologists start out as bird watchers or bug hunters, I started with a curiosity about why things exist.”
In Climbing Mount Improbable, which grew out of a series of televised talks by Dawkins, the author seeks to explain how natural selection produces complicated organs, with a primary focus on the eye. Assuming that the eye could not have resulted from evolution, he says, is like believing that it is impossible to reach the summit of an enormous mountain. But just as climbers have scaled the world’s highest peaks one step at a time, Dawkins argues, this organ has evolved gradually and through many intermediate stages. He finds examples of these stages in a variety of animals and also uses computer programs to simulate evolutionary steps.
New York Times Book Review critic Valerius Geist thought Climbing Mount Improbable worth reading, but voiced some reservations. While Geist considered Dawkins “a skilled writer and a spellbinding storyteller,” he added that the book contains “some painful oversimplification and a number of irritants.” For instance, he contended that Dawkins ignores “an organism’s ability to alter its physiology to accommodate changes in its environment—which normally thwarts natural selection on genes. Thus a false impression is conveyed that genes (mutations) generally produce the same results. They rarely do.” Audubon contributor Frank Graham, Jr., deemed the book a useful “supplement” to Dawkins’s other works. “Much of the argument in Climbing Mount Improbable repeats what Dawkins said, and said more to the point, in The Blind Watchmaker, ” Graham remarked. “Even the parable referred to in the title Climbing Mount Improbable —evolution’s taking the slow, sure paths up the rear of a mountain rather than trying to surmount in one bound the steep frontal cliffs—is not handled as deftly as that of his ‘watchmaker.’”
Scientist Stephen Jay Gould, like Dawkins a proponent of Darwin’s ideas, also had a problem with the symbolism of Climbing Mount Improbable. “Dawkins devises the metaphor of Mount Improbable for the worthy purpose of convincing skeptics that evolution can fashion complex designs one step at a time, with continuous adaptation maintained throughout,” Gould wrote in the journal Evolution. “But since evolution is the most contingent and pluralistic, the most irreducibly historic, of all major processes known to science, such imagery based on separation, linear causal chains, and predictable outcomes seems especially misleading in this field above all others. Shall we be satisfied with a primary image of populations as passive lumps, pushed by an external force called natural selection up peaks of a fixed landscape built by a firm of biomechanical engineers?” Gould answered his own question by saying: “Surely, we can do better,” and he felt that in the last third of the book, Dawkins indeed does better, using the metaphor of a shell to explore how organisms adapt from within as well as in response to outside influences. However, the combination of this with the earlier material “produces a volume that cannot cohere in its overall logic of sequential presentation” and may confuse general readers, Gould contended.
Michael Behe, who has a very different view of evolution—he asserts that he is not a creationist, but does believe that “intelligent design” is responsible for the universe—thought Dawkins’s defense of evolution unconvincing. “Lively prose can’t disguise the fact that science hasn’t a clue as to what might explain the development of life,” Behe maintained in a National Review piece on Climbing Mount Improbable. Dawkins, Behe noted, has a hard time finding evidence that the eye evolved in Darwinian fashion because “the interactive complexity of life’s machinery fits poorly with a theory of gradual development.” But, he added, Dawkins “doesn’t want the public to understand science so much as to understand that science … is in charge.” In contrast, New Statesman commentator Jon Turney was sympathetic to Dawkins’s views but felt the author is largely “preaching to the converted.” For those readers, he said, “the relentless emphasis on persuasion grows a little tiresome. The parade of people who reject Darwin, only to be debunked, get in the way of the story.” Some other reviewers found Dawkins’s arguments valuable, though. Geist doubted that Dawkins could “change the mind of creationists and hostile physicists,” but believed he “might dispel from receptive minds ignorant criticism of evolution. If so, his book will be of service to science and society.” Graham declared that Climbing Mount Improbable “constantly reminds us that Charles Darwin’s solution to how life developed from primal simplicity to wonderful complexity remains not only an unprecedented achievement in the history of thought but also the greatest story ever told.”
Dawkins’s 2003 title, A Devil’s Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love, is, according to Michael Ruse writing in the American Scientist, “literary ephemera: not real articles, or chapters, but bits and pieces—reviews, introductions to the books of others, eulogies, items in the popular press, and so forth.” Ruse went on to explain: “On another level, however, Dawkins’s collection is really interesting and does raise absolutely crucial issues.” For Ruse, the unifying theme of the entire collection is “the crusade of nonbelief.” In the book’s seven sections Dawkins casts a critical eye on topics from postmodernism to the Virgin Mary, noting the propensity of religion to be a vehicle for evil rather than good. Ruse, who holds many of the same opinions as Dawkins, nonetheless wrote: “I would like to see Dawkins take Christianity as seriously as he undoubtedly expects Christianity to take Darwinism.” Donna Seaman, writing in Booklist, felt this collection “serves as a primer to Dawkins’ interests and keenly rationalistic point of view.” A contributor to Publishers Weekly commented that while “Dawkins will antagonize some readers by his attacks on religion,” still his “enthusiasm for the diversity of life on this planet should prove contagious.”
Reviewing the work in the New Republic, Simon Blackburn observed: “Dawkins unashamedly and gloriously delights in science. If anything is sacred to him, it is truth and the patient road to it.” Blackburn noted that many of the essays in the collection “concern the interpretation of science, and the relationship between science and culture.” For Blackburn, Dawkins “is a superb writer, and a great advocate for sanity, and an endlessly informative resource. He should be compulsory reading for school boards everywhere.” George Wedd, writing in Contemporary Review, had a similar assessment of Dawkins and his essays, finding the author to be “a writer with a clear mind and a vigorous style, who knows a great deal and how to express it. He also has a strong sense of humour, which is latent even when he isn’t trying to be witty.” A critic for Kirkus Reviews called A Devil’s Chaplain “a pleasure-inducing voyage into scientific principles.”
With his 2004 work, The Ancestor’s Tale, Dawkins takes a more comprehensive view of evolution. He uses, as an organizing principle, a Chaucerian pilgrimage backward in time, finding numerous instances when the developmental path of humans touched upon or diverged from other species, such as amphibians, mammals, and primates. Each of these intersections provides an opportunity for a mini-lesson in evolutionary theory.
A reviewer for Publishers Weekly remarked: “This clever approach to our extended family tree should prove a natural hit with science readers.” Similarly, a contributor to Kirkus Reviews thought The Ancestor’s Tale is “one of Dawkins’ best: a big, almost encyclopedic compendium bursting with information and ideas,” and Bryce Christensen, writing in Booklist, commented that “Dawkins charts an impressive body of biological theory and research, sometimes speculatively but never obscurely” in this “lively and daring” book. Clive Cookson, writing in London’s Financial Times, called the same work “one of the richest accounts of evolution ever written,” while Steve Jones, writing in the Lancet, concluded that The Ancestor’s Tale “achieves the almost impossible: it makes biology (not biochemistry, brain science, or bird-watching, but biology as a whole) interesting again.”
Dawkins forcefully restates his atheism in The God Delusion. A Kirkus Reviews writer recommended the book as “exceptional reading—even funny at times.” Yet Dawkins is serious in his condemnation of religion as a force that has worked for great wrong in the world. He finds the modern rise in fundamentalism troubling, dangerous, and contrary to the principles of the founding fathers of the United States. The reviewer found Dawkins persuasive and concluded: “You needn’t buy the total Dawkins package to glory in his having the guts to lay out the evils religions can do.”
Other reviewers were more critical; writing in Cross Currents, Peter Heinegg noted: “On the whole, Dawkins makes all sorts of interesting points and scores any number of eye-catching hits, but he does seem rather blind to the social functions of religion.” A similar view was expressed by Alvin Plantinga in Books & Culture; he advised that while Dawkins is “an extremely gifted science writer,” readers “shouldn’t look to this book for even handed and thoughtful commentary.”
Continuing to promote science over religion, Dawkins authored The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. Dawkins explores the work of Charles Darwin in establishing the theory of evolution. He then goes on to discuss the science that developed over the ensuing centuries in support of this theory. In doing so, Dawkins attempts to refute the claims of Creationists. “Dawkins’s writing demonstrates once again his consummate skill as an explainer,” Richard Fortey remarked in the London Guardian. Dawkins “never makes assumptions about prior knowledge; when he chooses an analogy it does actually cast light on the thing to be explained (some scientists seem to find this extraordinarily difficult); and occasionally he coins a brilliant phrase. Those who have already climbed Mount Improbable with him or contemplated the blind watchmaker will not be disappointed, even though some of the same ground has been re-ploughed for a new crop.”
According to London Independent contributor Marek Kohn, “there are classic qualities in these pages; those of the old-fashioned science teacher rattling with well-polished quirks, his legend trailing in his wake, still fired with the passion to explain and inspire.” He added: “If I were a teacher, I would treasure [ The Greatest Show on Earth ] as a compendium of enlightening passages for my students. If Dawkins carries on this way, he’ll be hailed as a national treasure yet. Marcus Berkmann made a similar remark in the Spectator, asserting: “I had forgotten just how good a popular science writer Richard Dawkins is. He is driven by a fierce didactic impulse, an overwhelming need to inform and explain, as well as by massive, ungovernable rage. On the page he is the teacher we all wish we’d had, taking infinite care to make sure he is understood.” Berkmann went on to call The Greatest Show on Earth a “splendid, passionate and necessary book.” Anjana Ahuja, writing in the Times, was also impressed, and she commented: “Dawkins’ latest book should appeal to even those benighted souls he dismisses as fatuously ignorant. Thank the Lord for creationists. Without their blinkered belief in the biblical account of how life came to be, Richard Dawkins would never have felt the need to give us The Greatest Show on Earth. And what a fine, lucid and convincing exhibition he puts on, walking us through the natural world to demonstrate that evolution by natural selection is everywhere.”
In The Magic of Reality: How We Know What’s Really True, aimed at young readers, Dawkins covers the workings of the natural world and the history of the planet. Charles De Lint, writing in Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, commented: “How nervous you should be in letting your kids read it will depend on your worldview. If you subscribe to the validity of the scientific method (which this book, by the way, lays out in easy layman’s terms), then I recommend The Magic of Reality to you wholeheartedly.” Keith Taylor, writing in the Skeptical Inquirer, concluded in a review of the book: “The reader, even a pre-teenager, will not learn all the answers either, but looking for answers beats believing in impossible things.”
In 2013, Dawkins published An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist: A Memoir, in which he examines his early life and intellectual journey. Cosh Colby, writing in California Bookwatch, commented: “The book is worth reading if only because they do not make men like this anymore. They literally cannot.” Leah Libresco, writing in First Things, noted: “A reader looking for the making of a scientist would be better served by picking up Feynman’s book or Dawkins’ own writing on natural science like The Selfish Gene. In his memoir, Dawkins has too little curiosity about himself to stir the imagination.” Similarly, Christopher Booker, writing in Spectator, commented: “The truth is that Dawkins believes what he wishes to believe. He relies just as much on a leap of faith as those religious believers he so keenly affects to despise. His theory also cannot explain how those selfish genes eventually came to evolve the one species on earth, which is marked out by a unique capacity for self-obsessed egotism.”
In Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science, a follow-up to An Appetite for Wonder, Dawkins discusses the latter part of his life, the post-publication era. The writer uses the book to defend some of the choices and arguments in his first book and boasts about his publishing success. A Kirkus Reviews contributor called the memoir “an impressive overview of Dawkins’ life’s work, written with the freshness of youthful vigor.” Dwight Garner, writing in the New York Times Book Review, noted of Dawkins: “In Brief Candle in the Dark, his genial, vaguely remote bearing is a form of the proverbial stiff upper lip. This is a baggy and drifting yet mostly tart book of conspicuous intellectual consumption.”
Dawkins collects three decades of shorter writings, from essays to polemics, in his 2017 publication, Science in the Soul. Among other themes Dawkins explores are the importance of empirical evidence, the wrong-headedness of climate-change deniers, and bad science. He adds praise for the work of Charles Darwin and excoriates another Charles, Prince Charles, for filling a speech with anti-science. The writings collected here vary from science writing to cultural critique. Regarding the latter, a Publishers Weekly critic noted that the author’s well-known “contempt for sloppy thinking doesn’t extend to the social realm.” The critic went on to observe: “Dawkins’s pedantic tone and notable blind spots notwithstanding, his writings on evolution are worth reading and make for a satisfying introduction to one of today’s most prominent scientific thinkers.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor concluded: “For Dawkins fans, a must-have collection of scattered speeches and writings; for foes, more grist for the mill.” Writing in the Christian Science Monitor, Steve Donoghue also had praise for Science in the Soul, commenting: “Dawkins’s book ranges from parodies to polemics to ideological tributes to everybody from Charles Darwin to Carl Sagan to Christopher Hitchens, all of it rendered in gloriously spiky and opinionated prose.”
With his 2019 work, Outgrowing God: A Beginner’s Guide, Dawkins offers a “concise, provocative guide to thinking for yourself,” according to the online Friendly Atheist reviewer Hemant Mehta. The book is targeted at teens who are beginning to doubt the religion they were given by their parents. Here the author argues for a natural world developing without a grand designer, challenges the existence of God and the truth of the Bible, and questions whether in fact religion is good for people. A Kirkus Reviews critic felt that “there’s plenty of food for thought here,” and concluded, “Dawkins sings to the choir, though like-minded unbelievers will find ample support for their beliefs–or lack thereof.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
American Scientist, November-December, 2003, Michael Ruse, “Through a Glass Darkly,” review of A Devil’s Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love, p. 554; January 1, 2007, interview with Richard Dawkins, p. 75.
Audubon, January-February, 1997, Frank Graham, Jr., review of Climbing Mount Improbable, p. 108.
BioScience, November 1, 2009, “Why Darwin Was Right and Creationists Are Wrong,” p. 905.
Booklist, September 15, 2003, Donna Seaman, review of A Devil’s Chaplain, p. 189; October 15, 2003, Gilbert Taylor, review of Great American Science and Nature Writing, 2003, p. 365; October 1, 2004, Bryce Christensen, review of The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, p. 289; September 1, 2013, David Pitt, review of An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist: A Memoir, p. 21; August 1, 2015, Mark Levine, review of Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science, p. 11.
Books & Culture, March 1, 2007, Alvin Plantinga, “The Dawkins Confusion,” p. 21.
California Bookwatch, January, 2014, review of An Appetite for Wonder.
Choice, April, 2014, J.N. Muzio, review of An Appetite for Wonder, p. 1423.
Contemporary Review, October, 2003, George Wedd, “The Devil and Professor Dawkins,” review of A Devil’s Chaplain, p. 247.
Cross Currents, January 1, 2007, Peter Heinegg, “Atheists’ Hotline,” p. 128.
Economist, September 5, 2009, “It’s All There; the Evidence for Evolution,” p. 86.
Entertainment Weekly, October 29, 2004, Annie Barrett, “Big Fat Book in 60 Seconds Flat,” p. 75.
Evolution, June, 1997, Stephen Jay Gould, review of Climbing Mount Improbable, p. 1020.
Financial Times, September 18, 2004, Clive Cookson, “Primates on Parade,” review of The Ancestor’s Tale, p. 30.
First Things, August-September, 2004, Stephen M. Barr, review of A Devil’s Chaplain, p. 25; January, 2010, review of The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, p. 49; March, 2014, Leah Libresco, review of “Incurious Dawkins.”
Guardian (London, England), September 5, 2009, Richard Fortey, review of The Greatest Show on Earth.
Humanist, March-April, 2012, Ute Mitchell, review of The Magic of Reality: How We Know What’s Really True, p. 42.
Independent (London, England), September 18, 2009, Marek Kohn, review of The Greatest Show on Earth.
Internet Bookwatch, February 1, 2007, review of The God Delusion.
Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 2003, review of A Devil’s Chaplain, p. 1000; September 1, 2004, review of The Ancestor’s Tale, p. 846; August 1, 2006, review of The God Delusion, p. 764; July 1, 2009, review of The Greatest Show on Earth; December 1, 2011, review of The Magic of Reality; July 15, 2013, review of An Appetite for Wonder; June 15, 2015, review of Brief Candle in the Dark; June 1, 2017, review of Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist; July 1, 2019, review of Outgrowing God: A Beginner’s Guide.
Lancet, September 25, 2004, Steve Jones, “A Pilgrimage from Pliny to Powell via Platytpus,” review of The Ancestor’s Tale, p. 1117; December 2, 2006, “Thank God for Richard Dawkins?,” p. 1955.
Library Journal, September 15, 2003, Garrett Eastman, review of A Devil’s Chaplain, p. 88; September 15, 2004, Gregg Sapp, review of The Ancestor’s Tale, p. 80; November 15, 2006, Brad S. Matthies, review of The God Delusion, p. 75; August 1, 2009, Gregg Sapp, review of The Greatest Show on Earth, p. 103; July 1, 2013, David Keymer, review of An Appetite for Wonder, p. 100; June 15, 2015, Catherine Lantz, review of Brief Candle in the Dark, p. 107.
Los Angeles Times, November 25, 1986, Lee Dembart, review of The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design.
Maclean’s, November 25, 2013, Colby Cosh, review of An Appetite for Wonder, p. 84.
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May-June, 2012, Charles De Lint, review of The Magic of Reality, p. 39.
National Catholic Reporter, February 9, 2007, review of The God Delusion, p. 4.
National Review, October 14, 1996, Michael Behe, review of Climbing Mount Improbable, p. 83.
New Republic, December 1, 2003, Simon Blackburn, review of A Devil’s Chaplain, p. 29.
New Statesman, November 14, 1986, Steven Rose, review of The Blind Watchmaker, p. 29; April 26, 1996, Jon Turney, review of Climbing Mount Improbable, p. 35; December 12, 2011, Richard Dawkins, review of The Magic of Reality, p. 44; October 11, 2013, Ian Stewart, review of “Evolution in the Head,” p. 44.
New Yorker, April 11, 1977, review of The Selfish Gene; September 9, 1996, Ian Parker “Richard Dawkins’s Evolution,” p. 41; October 14, 2013, review of An Appetite for Wonder, p. 113.
New York Times, March 17, 1977, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, review of The Selfish Gene.
New York Times Book Review, February 27, 1977, John Pfeiffer, review of The Selfish Gene, p. 2; September 29, 1996, Valerius Geist, review of Climbing Mount Improbable; October 22, 2006, “Up Front,” p. 4; November 12, 2006, review of The God Delusion, p. 6; October 11, 2009, “Evolution All Around,” p. 22.
Popular Science, November 1, 2004, Jonathan Keats, “The Canterbury Tales of Evolution,” review of The Ancestor’s Tale, p. 114.
Publishers Weekly, July 29, 2003, review of A Devil’s Chaplain, p. 90; August 25, 2003, review of Great American Science and Nature Writing, 2003, p. 46; August 23, 2004, review of The Ancestor’s Tale, p. 45; July 13, 2009, Jonah Lehrer, review of The Greatest Show on Earth, p. 44; June 24, 2013, review of An Appetite for Wonder, p. 156; August 3, 2015, review of Brief Candle in the Dark, p. 46; June 12, 2017, review of Science in the Soul, p. 56.
Reference & Research Book News, August, 2006, review of The Selfish Gene; December, 2013, review of An Appetite for Wonder.
School Science and Mathematics, February, 2005, John Eichinger, review of The Young Oxford Library of Science, p. 107.
Science News, November 13, 2004, review of The Ancestor’s Tale, p. 319.
Skeptic (Altadena, CA), spring, 2004, William Harwood, review of A Devil’s Chaplain, p. 78; spring, 2010, “Is There Not Grandeur in This View?,” p. 64.
Skeptical Inquirer, March-April, 2004, Chris Mooney, “Not Too Bright,” p. 53; March, 2007, review of The God Delusion, p. 65; March, 2010, Kendrick Frazier, review of The Greatest Show on Earth; March-April, 2012, review of The Magic of Reality, p. 57; November-December, 2015, review of Brief Candle in the Dark, p. 58.
Spectator, January 15, 1977, Peter Medawar, review of The Selfish Gene, p. 20; September 25, 2004, Mark Ridley, review of The Ancestor’s Tale, p. 58; March 25, 2006, review of The Selfish Gene, p. 35; October 7, 2006, review of The God Delusion; October 17, 2009, Marcus Berkmann, “The Teacher You Wish You’d Had,” p. 48; September 21, 2013, Christopher Booker, review of “A Unique Capacity for Personal Egotism,” p. 45.
Times (London, England), October 3, 1986, David Jones, review of The Blind Watchmaker; December 11, 1986, Sarah Duncan, interview with Richard Dawkins; August 29, 2009. Anjana Ahuja, review of The Greatest Show on Earth.
Times Literary Supplement, February 4, 1977, C.D. Darlington, review of The Selfish Gene, p. 126; July 20, 1984, Davis Papineau, review of The Extended Phenotype: The Gene as the Unit of Selection, p. 799; September 26, 1986, Stephen R.L. Clark, review of The Blind Watchmaker, p. 1047.
Washington Post Book World, December 2, 1979, Douglas R. Hofstadter, review of The Selfish Gene.
ONLINE
BBC News Online, http://news.bbc.co.uk/ (July 29, 2004), “Q and A: Richard Dawkins.”
Christian Science Monitor, https://www.csmonitor.com/ (August 30, 2017), Steve Donoghue, review of Science in the Soul.
Christian Today, https://www.christiantoday.com/ (August 24, 2018), “Richard Dawkins Planning Atheism Books for Children and Teens to Stop ‘Religious Indoctrination’.”
Guardian, http://books.guardian.co.uk/ (June 21, 2003), Richard Dawkins, “The Future Looks Bright.”
Friendly Atheis, https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/ (July 8, 2019 ), Hemant Mehta, review of Outgrowing God.
Independent, http://www.independent.co.uk/ (February 12, 2016), author profile.
Live Science, https://www.livescience.com/ (June 12, 2017), Laura Geggel, “Why Atheist Richard Dawkins Supports Religious Education in Schools.”
London Independent, https://www.independent.co.uk/ (October 31, 2016), Andrew Griffin, “British Scientists Don’t Like Richard Dawkins, Finds Study That Didn’t Even Ask Questions about Richard Dawkins.”
New Statesman, https://www.newstatesman.com/ (January 30, 2019), George Eaton, author interview.
New York Times, New York Times Book Review (October 6, 2015), Dwight Garner, review of Brief Candle in the Dark.
Richard Dawkins Foundation, https://www.richarddawkins.net/ (August 17, 2019), “Richard Dawkins.”
Richard Dawkins, http://richarddawkins.net (July 30, 2010).
Salon.com, http://www.salon.com/ (April 28, 2005), Gordy Black, “The Atheist.”
Slate, http://www.slate.com/ (December 1, 2004), Jim Holt, “The Man behind the Meme: An Interview with Richard Dawkins.”
World of Richard Dawkins, http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins (May 31, 2007).
Richard Dawkins
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For the archaeologist, see Richard MacGillivray Dawkins.
Richard Dawkins
FRS FRSL
Dawkins at Cooper Union, New York City in 2010
Born
Clinton Richard Dawkins
26 March 1941 (age 78)
Nairobi, British Kenya
Citizenship
United Kingdom
Education
Oundle School
Alma mater
University of Oxford (MA, DPhil)
Known for
Gene-centred view of evolution
Concept of the meme
Middle World
Extended phenotype
Advocacy of science; criticism of religion; "New Atheism"[1]
Spouse(s)
Marian Stamp
(m. 1967; div. 1984)
Eve Barham
(m. 1984; div. 19??)
Lalla Ward
(m. 1992; sep. 2016)
Children
1
Awards
ZSL Silver Medal (1989)
Michael Faraday Prize (1990)
International Cosmos Prize (1997)
Nierenberg Prize (2009)
FRS (2001)[2]
Scientific career
Institutions
University of California, Berkeley
New College, Oxford
University of Oxford
New College of the Humanities
Thesis
Selective pecking in the domestic chick (1967)
Doctoral advisor
Nikolaas Tinbergen
Doctoral students
Alan Grafen
Mark Ridley[3]
Influences
Charles Darwin, W. D. Hamilton, Nikolaas Tinbergen[4][5]
Influenced
Andrew F. Read,[6] Helena Cronin,[7] John Krebs, Baron Krebs,[8] David Haig,[9] Alan Grafen,[10] Daniel Dennett,[11] David Deutsch,[12] Steven Pinker,[13] Martin Daly,[14] Margo Wilson,[14] Randolph M. Nesse,[15] Kim Sterelny,[16] Michael Shermer,[17] Richard Harries, Baron Harries of Pentregarth,[18] A. C. Grayling,[19] Marek Kohn,[20] David P. Barash,[21] Matt Ridley,[22] Philip Pullman[23]
Richard Dawkins introduces himself. (Recorded November, 2016.)
Menu
0:00
Richard Dawkins on science education. (From the BBC programme "Start the Week", 17 October 2011)
Menu
0:00
Website
richarddawkins.net
Signature
Clinton Richard Dawkins, FRS FRSL (born 26 March 1941) is an English ethologist, evolutionary biologist, and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was the University of Oxford's Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008.
Dawkins first came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which popularised the gene-centred view of evolution and introduced the term meme. With his book The Extended Phenotype (1982), he introduced into evolutionary biology the influential concept that the phenotypic effects of a gene are not necessarily limited to an organism's body, but can stretch far into the environment. In 2006, he founded the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science.
Dawkins is known as an outspoken atheist. He is well known for his criticism of creationism and intelligent design. In The Blind Watchmaker (1986), he argues against the watchmaker analogy, an argument for the existence of a supernatural creator based upon the complexity of living organisms. Instead, he describes evolutionary processes as analogous to a blind watchmaker, in that reproduction, mutation, and selection are unguided by any designer. In The God Delusion (2006), Dawkins contends that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that religious faith is a delusion.
Dawkins has been awarded many prestigious academic and writing awards, and he makes regular television, radio, and Internet appearances, predominantly discussing his books, his atheism, and his ideas and opinions as a public intellectual.
Contents
1
Background
1.1
Early life
1.2
Education
1.3
Teaching
2
Work
2.1
Evolutionary biology
2.2
Fathering the meme
2.3
Foundation
2.4
Criticism of religion
2.4.1
Criticism of creationism
2.5
Political views
2.6
Other fields
3
Awards and recognition
4
Personal life
5
Media
5.1
Selected publications
5.2
Documentary films
5.3
Other appearances
6
Notes
7
References
7.1
Cited texts
8
External links
Background[edit]
Early life[edit]
Dawkins was born in Nairobi, then in British Kenya, on 26 March 1941.[24] He is the son of Jean Mary Vyvyan (née Ladner; born 1916)[25] and Clinton John Dawkins (1915–2010), an agricultural civil servant in the British Colonial Service in Nyasaland (present-day Malawi), of an Oxfordshire landed gentry family.[24][26][27] His father was called up into the King's African Rifles during World War II[28][29] 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.[27] Dawkins considers himself English and lives in Oxford, England.[30][31][32][33] Dawkins has a younger sister, Sarah.[34]
Both his parents were interested in natural sciences, and they answered Dawkins's questions in scientific terms.[35] Dawkins describes his childhood as "a normal Anglican upbringing".[36] He embraced Christianity until halfway through his teenage years, at which point he concluded that the theory of evolution was a better explanation for life's complexity, and ceased believing in a god.[34] Dawkins 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."[34]
Education[edit]
The Great Hall, Oundle School
From 1954 to 1959 Dawkins attended Oundle School in Northamptonshire, an English public school with a distinct Church of England flavour,[34] where he was in Laundimer house.[37] While at Oundle, Dawkins read Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian for the first time.[38] He studied zoology at Balliol College, Oxford, graduating in 1962; while there, he was tutored by Nobel Prize-winning ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen. He graduated with second-class honours.[39] He continued as a research student under Tinbergen's supervision, receiving his MA and Doctor of Philosophy[40] degrees by 1966, and remained a research assistant for another year.[41][42] Tinbergen was a pioneer in the study of animal behaviour, particularly in the areas of instinct, learning, and choice;[43] Dawkins's research in this period concerned models of animal decision-making.[44]
Teaching[edit]
From 1967 to 1969, he 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.[45] 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",[46] and that its first holder should be Richard Dawkins.[47] He held that professorship from 1995 until 2008.[48]
Since 1970, he has been a fellow of New College, Oxford, and he is now an emeritus fellow.[49][50] 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).[41] 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 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.[51]
Dawkins has sat on judging panels for awards as diverse as the Royal Society's Faraday Award and the British Academy Television Awards,[41] 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".[52] 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."[53]
In 2011, Dawkins joined the professoriate of the New College of the Humanities, a new private university in London, established by A. C. Grayling, which opened in September 2012.[54]
Work[edit]
Evolutionary biology[edit]
Further information: Gene-centred view of evolution
At the University of Texas at Austin, March 2008
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 his books:[55][56]
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,[57] 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.[58]
Dawkins has consistently been sceptical about non-adaptive processes in evolution (such as spandrels, described by Gould and Lewontin)[59] and about selection at levels "above" that of the gene.[60] He is particularly sceptical about the practical possibility or importance of group selection as a basis for understanding altruism.[61] This behaviour appears at first to be an evolutionary paradox, since helping others costs precious resources and decreases one's own fitness. Previously, many had interpreted this as an aspect of group selection: individuals are doing what is best for the survival of the population or species as a whole. 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).[62][a] Hamilton's inclusive fitness has since been successfully applied to a wide range of organisms, including humans. Similarly, 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.[63] Dawkins popularised these ideas in The Selfish Gene, and developed them in his own work.[64] In June 2012, Dawkins was highly critical of fellow biologist E. O. Wilson's 2012 book The Social Conquest of Earth as misunderstanding Hamilton's theory of kin selection.[65][66] Dawkins has also been strongly critical of the Gaia hypothesis of the independent scientist James Lovelock.[67][68][69]
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).[70] In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins explains that he is using George C. Williams's definition of the gene as "that which segregates and recombines with appreciable frequency".[71] 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".[72] 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,[73][74] has criticised gene selection, memetics, and sociobiology as being excessively reductionist;[75] 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.[76]
In a set of controversies over the mechanisms and interpretation of evolution (what has been called 'The Darwin Wars'),[77][78] 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.[79][80] 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.[81] 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.[82] 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.[83] 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 informs 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.[33]
Fathering the meme[edit]
Main article: Meme
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.[84] 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.[85]
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.[86]
Although Dawkins invented the term meme, he has not claimed that the idea was entirely novel,[87] 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.[88] 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.[89] 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.[88] In his own work, Maeterlinck tried to explain memory in termites and ants by claiming that neural memory traces were added "upon the individual mneme".[89] Nonetheless, 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".[90]
Foundation[edit]
Main article: Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science
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.[91] In January 2016, it was announced that the foundation was merging with the Center for Inquiry, with Dawkins becoming a member of the new organization's board of directors.[92]
Criticism of religion[edit]
Lecturing on his book The God Delusion, 24 June 2006
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 civilized world could still be so uneducated in biology,[93] and is puzzled by how belief in God could remain among individuals who are sophisticated in science. Dawkins notes that some physicists use 'God' as a metaphor for the general awe-inspiring mysteries of the universe, which 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.[94] He disagrees with Stephen Jay Gould's principle of nonoverlapping magisteria (NOMA)[95] and suggests that the existence of God should be treated as a scientific hypothesis like any other.[96] 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.[97] He considers faith—belief that is not based on evidence—as "one of the world's great evils".[98]
On his spectrum of theistic probability, which has seven levels between 1 (100% certainty that a God or gods exist) and 7 (100% 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."[99][100] 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.[101] In addition to beliefs in deities, Dawkins has criticized other irrational religious beliefs such as 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 Missouri, that Jesus' mother was a virgin, that Muhammad split the moon, and that Lazarus was raised from the dead.[109]
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 best seller.[110] As of 2015, more than three million copies have been sold and the book has been translated into over 30 languages.[111] 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.[112] 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".[113] In his February 2002 TED talk entitled "Militant atheism", Dawkins urged all atheists to openly state their position and to fight the incursion of the church into politics and science.[114] On 30 September 2007, Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett met at Hitchens's residence for a private, unmoderated discussion that lasted two hours. The event was videotaped and entitled "The Four Horsemen".[115]
Dawkins sees education and consciousness-raising as the primary tools in opposing what he considers to be religious dogma and indoctrination.[45][116][117] 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.[117] He has given support to the idea of a free-thinking school,[118] which would not "indoctrinate children" but would instead teach children to ask for evidence, 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.[119][120] 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.[117]
While some critics, such as writer Christopher Hitchens, psychologist Steven Pinker and Nobel laureates Sir Harold Kroto, James D. Watson, and Steven Weinberg have defended Dawkins's stance on religion and praised his work,[121] others, including Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist Peter Higgs, astrophysicist Martin Rees, philosopher of science Michael Ruse, literary critic Terry Eagleton, philosopher Roger Scruton, psychologist Camille Paglia, atheist philosopher Daniel Came and theologian Alister McGrath,[128] have criticised Dawkins on various grounds, including the assertion that his work simply serves as an atheist counterpart to religious fundamentalism rather than a productive critique of it, and that he has fundamentally misapprehended the foundations of the theological positions he claims to refute. Rees and Higgs, in particular, have both rejected Dawkins's confrontational stance toward religion as narrow and "embarrassing", with Higgs going as far as to equate Dawkins with the religious fundamentalists he criticises.[129][130][131][132] Atheist philosopher John Gray has denounced Dawkins as an "anti-religious missionary", whose assertions are "in no sense novel or original," suggesting that "transfixed in wonderment at the workings of his own mind, Dawkins misses much that is of importance in human beings." Gray has also criticised Dawkins's perceived allegiance to Darwin, stating that if "science, for Darwin, was a method of inquiry that enabled him to edge tentatively and humbly toward the truth, for Dawkins, science is an unquestioned view of the world."[133] In response to his critics, Dawkins maintains that theologians are no better than scientists in addressing deep cosmological questions and that he is not a fundamentalist, as he is willing to change his mind in the face of new evidence.[134][135][136] Roger Scruton has said that Dawkins cherry-picks his data, and ignores the benefits of religion, saying "Richard Dawkins believes that faith is an infectious disease which spreads intolerance and conflict. In fact it is our principal source of love and peace."[126]
Criticism of creationism[edit]
Dawkins is a prominent critic of creationism, a religious belief that humanity, life, and the universe were created by a deity[137] without recourse to evolution.[138] He has described the Young Earth creationist view that the Earth is only a few thousand years old as "a preposterous, mind-shrinking falsehood".[139] His 1986 book, The Blind Watchmaker, contains a sustained critique of the argument from design, an important creationist argument. In the book, Dawkins argues against the watchmaker analogy made famous by the eighteenth-century English theologian William Paley via his book Natural Theology, in which Paley argues that just as a watch is too complicated and too functional to have sprung into existence merely by accident, so too must all living things—with their far greater complexity—be purposefully designed. Dawkins shares the view generally held by scientists that natural selection is sufficient to explain the apparent functionality and non-random complexity of the biological world, and can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, albeit as an automatic, unguided by any designer, nonintelligent, blind watchmaker.[140]
Wearing a scarlet 'A' lapel pin, at the 34th annual conference of American Atheists (2008)
In 1986, Dawkins and biologist John Maynard Smith participated in an Oxford Union debate against A. E. Wilder-Smith (a Young Earth creationist) and Edgar Andrews (president of the Biblical Creation Society).[b] In general, however, Dawkins has followed the advice of his late colleague Stephen Jay Gould and refused to participate in formal debates with creationists because "what they seek is the oxygen of respectability", and doing so would "give them this oxygen by the mere act of engaging with them at all". He suggests that creationists "don't mind being beaten in an argument. What matters is that we give them recognition by bothering to argue with them in public."[141] In a December 2004 interview with American journalist Bill Moyers, Dawkins said that "among the things that science does know, evolution is about as certain as anything we know." When Moyers questioned him on the use of the word theory, Dawkins stated that "evolution has been observed. It's just that it hasn't been observed while it's happening." He added that "it is rather like a detective coming on a murder after the scene... the detective hasn't actually seen the murder take place, of course. But what you do see is a massive clue... Huge quantities of circumstantial evidence. It might as well be spelled out in words of English."[142]
Dawkins has opposed the inclusion of intelligent design in science education, describing it as "not a scientific argument at all, but a religious one".[143] He has been referred to in the media as "Darwin's Rottweiler",[144][145] a reference to English biologist T. H. Huxley, who was known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his advocacy of Charles Darwin's evolutionary ideas. He has been a strong critic of the British organisation Truth in Science, which promotes the teaching of creationism in state schools, and whose work Dawkins has described as an "educational scandal". He plans to subsidise schools through the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science with the delivery of books, DVDs, and pamphlets that counteract their work.[146]
Political views[edit]
See also: Political views of Richard Dawkins
With Ariane Sherine at the Atheist Bus Campaign launch in London
Speaking at Kepler's Books, Menlo Park, California, 29 October 2006
Play media
Dawkins discusses free speech and Islam(ism) at the 2017 Conference on Free Expression and Conscience
Dawkins is an outspoken atheist[147] and a supporter of various atheist, secular, and humanistic organisations,[41][148][149][150][151][152][153] including Humanists UK and the Brights movement.[114] Dawkins suggests that atheists should be proud, not apologetic, stressing that atheism is evidence of a healthy, independent mind.[154] He hopes that the more atheists identify themselves, the more the public will become aware of just how many people are nonbelievers, thereby reducing the negative opinion of atheism among the religious majority.[155] Inspired by the gay rights movement, he endorsed the Out Campaign to encourage atheists worldwide to declare their stance publicly.[156] He supported a UK atheist advertising initiative, the Atheist Bus Campaign in 2008, which aimed to raise funds to place atheist advertisements on buses in the London area.[157]
Dawkins has expressed concern about the growth of human population and about the matter of overpopulation.[158] In The Selfish Gene, he briefly mentions population growth, giving the example of Latin America, whose population, at the time the book was written, was doubling every 40 years. He is critical of Roman Catholic attitudes to family planning and population control, stating that leaders who forbid contraception and "express a preference for 'natural' methods of population limitation" will get just such a method in the form of starvation.[159]
As a supporter of the Great Ape Project—a movement to extend certain moral and legal rights to all great apes—Dawkins contributed the article 'Gaps in the Mind' to the Great Ape Project book edited by Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer. In this essay, he criticises contemporary society's moral attitudes as being based on a "discontinuous, speciesist imperative".[160]
Dawkins also regularly comments in newspapers and blogs on contemporary political questions and is a frequent contributor to the online science and culture digest 3 Quarks Daily.[161] His opinions include opposition to the 2003 invasion of Iraq,[162] the British nuclear deterrent, the actions of then-US President George W. Bush,[163] and the ethics of designer babies.[164] Several such articles were included in A Devil's Chaplain, an anthology of writings about science, religion, and politics. He is also a supporter of Republic's campaign to replace the British monarchy with a democratically elected president.[165] Dawkins has described himself as a Labour voter in the 1970s[166] and voter for the Liberal Democrats since the party's creation. In 2009, he spoke at the party's conference in opposition to blasphemy laws, alternative medicine, and faith schools. In the UK general election of 2010, Dawkins officially endorsed the Liberal Democrats, in support of their campaign for electoral reform and for their "refusal to pander to 'faith'".[167] In the run up to the 2017 general election, Dawkins once again endorsed the Liberal Democrats and urged voters to join the party.
In 1998, Dawkins expressed his appreciation for two books connected with the Sokal affair, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science by Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt and Intellectual Impostures by Sokal and Jean Bricmont. These books are famous for their criticism of postmodernism in US universities (namely in the departments of literary studies, anthropology, and other cultural studies).[168]
Dawkins has voiced his support for the Campaign for the Establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, an organisation that campaigns for democratic reform in the United Nations, and the creation of a more accountable international political system.[169]
Dawkins identifies as a feminist.[170] Dawkins has said that feminism is "enormously important" and "a political movement that deserves to be supported".[171]
Other fields[edit]
In his role as professor for public understanding of science, Dawkins has been a critic of pseudoscience and alternative medicine. His 1998 book Unweaving the Rainbow considers John Keats's accusation that by explaining the rainbow, Isaac Newton diminished its beauty; Dawkins argues for the opposite conclusion. He suggests that deep space, the billions of years of life's evolution, and the microscopic workings of biology and heredity contain more beauty and wonder than do "myths" and "pseudoscience".[172] For John Diamond's posthumously published Snake Oil, a book devoted to debunking alternative medicine, Dawkins wrote a foreword in which he asserts that alternative medicine is harmful, if only because it distracts patients from more successful conventional treatments and gives people false hopes.[173] Dawkins states that "There is no alternative medicine. There is only medicine that works and medicine that doesn't work."[174] In his 2007 Channel 4 TV film The Enemies of Reason, Dawkins concluded that Britain is gripped by "an epidemic of superstitious thinking".[175]
Continuing a long-standing partnership with Channel 4, Dawkins participated in a five-part television series, Genius of Britain, along with fellow scientists Stephen Hawking, James Dyson, Paul Nurse, and Jim Al-Khalili. The series was first broadcast in June 2010, and focuses on major, British, scientific achievements throughout history.[176]
In 2014 he joined the global awareness movement Asteroid Day as a "100x Signatory".[177]
Jayce Lewis alongside Richard Dawkins at the Home of Dawkins working together on Jayce's album Million (Part 2)
Dawkins worked alongside Welsh Musician Jayce Lewis contributing a recorded spoken word for the track 'Exhale' from his 1998 book Unweaving the Rainbow to the Welshman's 3rd full-length album 'Million'.
Awards and recognition[edit]
Receiving the Deschner Prize in Frankfurt, 12 October 2007, from Karlheinz Deschner
Dawkins was awarded a Doctor of Science degree by the University of Oxford in 1989. He holds honorary doctorates in science from the University of Huddersfield, University of Westminster, Durham University,[178] the University of Hull, the University of Antwerp, the University of Oslo, the University of Aberdeen,[179] Open University, the Vrije Universiteit Brussel,[41] and the University of Valencia.[180] He also holds honorary doctorates of letters from the University of St Andrews and the Australian National University (HonLittD, 1996), and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1997 and a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2001.[2][41] He is one of the patrons of the Oxford University Scientific Society.
In 1987, Dawkins received a Royal Society of Literature award and a Los Angeles Times Literary Prize for his book The Blind Watchmaker. In the same year, he received a Sci. Tech Prize for Best Television Documentary Science Programme of the Year for his work on the BBC's Horizon episode The Blind Watchmaker.[41]
Other awards include the Zoological Society of London's Silver Medal (1989), the Finlay Innovation Award (1990), the Michael Faraday Award (1990), the Nakayama Prize (1994), the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year Award (1996), the fifth International Cosmos Prize (1997), the Kistler Prize (2001), the Medal of the Presidency of the Italian Republic (2001), the 2001 and 2012 Emperor Has No Clothes Award from the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the Bicentennial Kelvin Medal of The Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow (2002),[41] and the Nierenberg Prize for Science in the Public Interest (2009).[181] He was awarded the Deschner Award, named after German anti-clerical author Karlheinz Deschner.[182] The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSICOP) has awarded Dawkins their highest award In Praise of Reason (1992).[183]
Dawkins accepting the Services to Humanism award at the British Humanist Association Annual Conference in 2012
Dawkins topped Prospect magazine's 2004 list of the top 100 public British intellectuals, as decided by the readers, receiving twice as many votes as the runner-up.[184][185] He was shortlisted as a candidate in their 2008 follow-up poll.[186] In a poll held by Prospect in 2013, Dawkins was voted the world's top thinker based on 65 names chosen by a largely US and UK-based expert panel.[187]
In 2005, the Hamburg-based Alfred Toepfer Foundation awarded him its Shakespeare Prize in recognition of his "concise and accessible presentation of scientific knowledge". He won the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science for 2006, as well as the Galaxy British Book Awards's Author of the Year Award for 2007.[188] In the same year, he was listed by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2007,[189] and was ranked 20th in The Daily Telegraph's 2007 list of 100 greatest living geniuses.[190]
Since 2003, the Atheist Alliance International has awarded a prize during its annual conference, honouring an outstanding atheist whose work has done the most to raise public awareness of atheism during that year; it is known as the Richard Dawkins Award, in honour of Dawkins's own efforts.[191] In February 2010, Dawkins was named to the Freedom From Religion Foundation's Honorary Board of distinguished achievers.[192]
In 2012, ichthyologists in Sri Lanka honored Dawkins by creating Dawkinsia as a new genus name (members of this genus were formerly members of the genus Puntius). Explaining the reasoning behind the genus name, lead researcher Rohan Pethiyagoda was quoted as stating, "Richard Dawkins has, through his writings, helped us understand that the universe is far more beautiful and awe-inspiring than any religion has imagined [...]. We hope that Dawkinsia will serve as a reminder of the elegance and simplicity of evolution, the only rational explanation there is for the unimaginable diversity of life on Earth.[193]
Personal life[edit]
Dawkins has been married three times, and has one daughter. On 19 August 1967, Dawkins married fellow ethologist Marian Stamp in the Protestant church in Annestown, County Waterford, Ireland;[194] they divorced in 1984. On 1 June 1984, he married Eve Barham (1951–1999) in Oxford. They had a daughter, Juliet Emma Dawkins (born 1984, Oxford). Dawkins and Barham divorced.[195] In 1992, he married actress Lalla Ward[195] in Kensington and Chelsea, London. Dawkins met her through their mutual friend Douglas Adams,[196] who had worked with her on the BBC's Doctor Who. Dawkins and Ward separated in 2016 and they later described the separation as "entirely amicable".[197]
On 6 February 2016, Dawkins suffered a minor hemorrhagic stroke while at home.[198][199] Dawkins reported later that same year that he had almost completely recovered.[200][201]
Media[edit]
Selected publications[edit]
Main article: Richard Dawkins bibliography
The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1976. ISBN 978-0-19-286092-7.
The Extended Phenotype. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1982. ISBN 978-0-19-288051-2.
The Blind Watchmaker. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 1986. ISBN 978-0-393-31570-7.
River Out of Eden. New York: Basic Books. 1995. ISBN 978-0-465-06990-3. Book text
Climbing Mount Improbable. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. 1996. ISBN 978-0-393-31682-7.
Unweaving the Rainbow. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 1998. ISBN 978-0-618-05673-6.
A Devil's Chaplain. Weidenfeld & Nicolson (United Kingdom and Commonwealth), Houghton Mifflin (United States). 2003. ISBN 978-0753817506.
The Ancestor's Tale. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 2004. ISBN 978-0-618-00583-3.
The God Delusion. Bantam Press (United Kingdom), Houghton Mifflin (United States). 2006. ISBN 978-0-618-68000-9.
The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. Transworld (United Kingdom and Commonwealth), Free Press (United States). 2009. ISBN 978-0-593-06173-2.
The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True. Bantam Press (United Kingdom), Free Press (United States). 2011. ISBN 978-1-4391-9281-8. OCLC 709673132.
An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist. Bantam Press (United Kingdom and United States). 2013. ISBN 978-0-06-228715-1.
Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science. Bantam Press (United Kingdom and United States). 2015. ISBN 978-0062288431.
Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist. Random House. 2017. ISBN 978-1-4735-4166-5.
Documentary films[edit]
Nice Guys Finish First (1986)
The Blind Watchmaker (1987)[202]
Growing Up in the Universe (1991)
Break the Science Barrier (1996)
The Atheism Tapes (2004)
The Big Question (2005) – Part 3 of the TV series, titled "Why Are We Here?"
The Root of All Evil? (2006)
The Enemies of Reason (2007)
The Genius of Charles Darwin (2008)
The Purpose of Purpose (2009) – Lecture tour among American universities
Faith School Menace? (2010)
Beautiful Minds (April 2012) – BBC4 documentary
Sex, Death and the Meaning of Life (2012)[203]
The Unbelievers (2013)
Other appearances[edit]
Dawkins has made many television appearances on news shows providing his political opinions and especially his views as an atheist. He has been interviewed on the radio, often as part of his book tours. He has debated many religious figures. He has made many university speaking appearances, again often in coordination with his book tours. As of 2016, he has over 60 credits in the Internet Movie Database where he appeared as himself.
Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (2008) – as himself, presented as a leading scientific opponent of intelligent design in a film that contends that the mainstream science establishment suppresses academics who believe they see evidence of intelligent design in nature and who criticise evidence supporting Darwinian evolution
Doctor Who: "The Stolen Earth" (2008) – as himself
The Simpsons: "Black Eyed, Please" (2013) – appears in Ned Flanders' dream of Hell; provided voice as a demon version of himself[204]
Endless Forms Most Beautiful (2015) – by Nightwish: Finnish symphonic metal band Nightwish had Dawkins as a guest star on the album.[205][206][207] He provides narration on two tracks: "Shudder Before the Beautiful", in which he opens the album with one of his own quotes, and "The Greatest Show on Earth", inspired by and named after his book The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, and in which he quotes On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin.[208][209] He subsequently performed his parts live with Nightwish on 19 December 2015 at the Wembley Arena in London; the concert was later released as a part of a live album/DVD titled Vehicle of Spirit.
Richard Dawkins
Bio
One of the most respected scientists in the world and the biggest draw in secularism, Richard Dawkins always generates impressive crowds when visiting North America. Secularism is sweeping America as a movement, and Richard Dawkins is the catalyst who galvanizes it.
From 1995 to 2008 Richard Dawkins was the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. He is an internationally best-selling author. Among his books are The Ancestor’s Tale, The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable, Unweaving the Rainbow, A Devil’s Chaplain, The God Delusion, The Greatest Show on Earth and The Magic of Reality. His most recent books are his two-part autobiography. Part 1 An Appetite for Wonder, released in 2013 and A Brief Candle in the Dark released in 2015.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and of the Royal Society of Literature. His around-the-world speaking tour is the focus of a recent documentary “The Unbelievers” which also features appearances by Woody Allen, Stephen Colbert, Cameron Diaz, Ian McEwan, Ricky Gervais, Stephen Hawking, Eddie Izzard, Bill Pullman, and Sarah Silverman.
Visit the ‘Ultimate Collection’ of Richard Dawkins where you can find all the important articles, video and more by or about Richard Dawkins.
30 January 2019
Richard Dawkins interview: “I’d rather people read my books than my tweets”
The atheist and God Delusion author on Brexit, Islamophobia and why he fears his social media presence has damaged his reputation.
By
George Eaton
JANA LENZOVA
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In the digital age, reputations made over decades can be lost in minutes. Richard Dawkins first achieved renown as a pioneering evolutionary biologist (through his 1976 bestseller, The Selfish Gene) and, later, as a polemical foe of religion (through 2006’s The God Delusion). Yet he is now increasingly defined by his incendiary tweets, which have been plausibly denounced as Islamophobic.
“Listening to the lovely bells of Winchester, one of our great medieval cathedrals,” he wrote to his 2.8 million Twitter followers last July. “So much nicer than the aggressive-sounding ‘Allahu akhbar.’ Or is that just my cultural upbringing?” How, I have sometimes wondered, does the former Oxford University professor for the public understanding of science feel about his new reputation?
One recent afternoon I met Dawkins, who is 77, at the spacious apartment he shares with his girlfriend (he is twice-divorced) in central Oxford. He proudly showed me his meticulously catalogued library (including a “controversy” section). The occasion for our meeting was the publication of The Four Horsemen: The Conversation that Sparked an Atheist Revolution, a transcript of the 2007 discussion between Dawkins and three fellow atheists: the late Christopher Hitchens (with whom Dawkins conducted the final interview in the New Statesman in 2011), Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett.
Dennett, an American philosopher and cognitive scientist, has since warned that Dawkins’s tweets “could be seriously damaging his long-term legacy”. The theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss, another friend, has remarked: “I wish he wouldn’t do it [tweet]. I told him that.”
When I put these judgements to Dawkins, he conceded: “They’ve probably got a point… I’m trying to be more careful to make sure that my sticks don’t have wrong ends.” He reflected: “The problem with tweets is that they’re too short. What I should have added, which I did in a reply, is that I love the [Islamic] call to prayer, it can be very moving, especially when done by a decent voice. But often ‘Allahu akbar’ is the last thing you hear before you’re blown up. Church bells are never the last thing you hear before you’re murdered.”
Dawkins, who tweeted in 2013 that “all the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge” (adding that “they did great things in the Middle Ages, though”), dismissed all charges of Islamophobia: “I think it’s a very bad term, a very mischievous and misleading term.” He is, he said, a “religionophobe”, but does he have no sympathy for Muslims who are demonised by the far right and the British press?
“It’s terrible. Muslims are the greatest victims of Islam and they’re the greatest victims of prejudice against Muslims. I have no prejudice against Muslims whatsoever, my dislike is of the ideology with which they’ve been forcibly indoctrinated as children.”
Six years ago, Dawkins described Islam as the “greatest force for evil today”. Now, he says, nationalism is a better candidate, but he has not ceased his crusade against religion. In the autumn, he will publish a new book, Outgrowing God (“I think of it as atheism for teenagers”) and he hopes to write one for “younger children” too.
Is this not precisely the indoctrination he denounces? “I’m very keen to avoid that, of course,” Dawkins said. “The book will be loaded with, ‘Do you agree? Think about it for yourself.’” He remarked, without irony,that the reference by some non-believers to “atheist children” was “a sin” since “the child is too young to have made up its own mind”.
Dawkins is aggrieved by Brexit (“I’m trying to learn German as a gesture of solidarity”), though he conceded with scientific modesty: “I don’t think I know enough to say much about the actual pros and cons of the European Union.
“What I feel passionately is that [David] Cameron should never have called that referendum. Cameron will be damned by history as one of the worst prime ministers ever for sacrificing the long-term future of the country for the sake of a petty internal squabble.”
He argued that, as with US constitutional amendments, a two-thirds majority should have been required for a binding result. “A simple 50 per cent majority is not good enough on an issue this important.”
Theresa May, he said, had “shown a quasi-religious impulse in her obstinate determination to see Brexit through because that’s what the British people want. It’s almost a kind of theological mantra.”
Dawkins is a long-standing supporter of the Liberal Democrats and has unsuccessfully urged them to rename themselves “the European Party” as a means of detoxifying their brand. “I’m sorry that the Lib Dems are seen as having blotted their copybook by joining the Tories.”
At the close of our conversation, I asked Dawkins how he viewed the prospect of death. “I find the idea of eternity and infinity frightening… Death is a general anaesthetic.” And what of his posthumous reputation? “I do derive great comfort from the thought that I’ve written quite a number of books and they’re very widely read and I hope that they will go on being read. I depart from Woody Allen’s remark: ‘I don’t want to live on in my works, I want to live on in my apartment.’”
Does he worry that some may first encounter him through his tweets? “That is a worry. I’d rather they read my books.”
British scientists don't like Richard Dawkins, finds study that didn't even ask questions about Richard Dawkins
The investigation into science's public image didn't even ask about the atheist professor, but it got an answer anyway
Andrew Griffin
@_andrew_griffin
Monday 31 October 2016 16:53
789 comments
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The Independent
Others were quick to defend Dawkins, saying that the public appreciation of science, reason, and free inquiry has benefited enormously from his work ( Getty )
British scientists who mentioned Richard Dawkins during a recent study seem mostly to dislike him, with some arguing that he misrepresents science and is misleading the public.
Criticism of the British evolutionary biologist came up repeatedly in a new study looking at public understanding of science and how scientists feel that they are portrayed in the media – despite respondents never actually being asked about him. The research was published in a recent edition of Public Understandings of Science as part of a broader study looking at how scientists feel about religion.
As part of the study, the researchers conducted a survey of over 20,000 scientists from eight countries. In the UK, the researchers surveyed 1,581 randomly sampled scientists. They then spoke to 137 of them for in-depth interviews to see what they thought.
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Though Dawkins wasn’t a part of the interview process, and researchers didn’t ask about him, 48 of the 137 British scientists they spoke to mentioned Dawkins. Of those 48 that referenced him, 80 per cent said they thought that Dawkins misrepresents science and scientists in his books and public speeches, according to the study by Rice University, Texas.
Other scientists did stand up for the evolutionary biologist, and the remaining 20 per cent were positive views. One said that Dawkins has “quite an important place in society” because of his criticism of creationism and intelligent design. The study was funded by the Templeton Foundation, which has traditionally opposed Dawkins' work.
Read more
Read more Richard Dawkins responds to the suggestion atheists are violent
Some of the scientists interviewed as part of the exercise were religious, and so might be expected to take against Dawkins’ often vociferous opposition to religion. But even scientists who didn’t believe in religion at all said that Dawkins work tended to overestimate the borders of what science can and should examine.
“Scientists differ in their view of where such borders rest,” said David Johnson, an assistant professor at the University of Nevada in Reno and the paper’s lead author. “And they may even view belief in a deity as irrational, but they do not view questions related to the existence of deities or ‘the sacred’ as within the scope of science.”
The common criticism was that Dawkins was too strong in his criticism of religion, and one nonreligious professor of biology referred to him as a “fundamental atheist”. "He feels compelled to take the evidence way beyond that which other scientists would regard as possible. ... I want [students] to develop [science] in their own lives. And I think it's necessary to understand what science does address directly."
Another described his work as a “crusade, basically”, and said that though he was right his work is “deliberately designed to alienate religious people”.
One nonreligious physicist said that Dawkins is “much too strong about the way he denies religion”, according to Rice University.
How can we stop violence in the name of religion?
“As a scientist, you’ve got to be very open, and I’m open to people’s belief in religion … I don’t think we’re in a position to deny anything unless it’s something which is within the scope of science to deny … I think as a scientist you should be open to it … It doesn’t end up encroaching for me because I think there’s quite a space between the two.”
Supporters of Dawkins said that it was fine that some find themselves frustrated with his style.
“It was not so long ago that scientists were decrying the science popularisation of Carl Sagan, and even today there are some who take issue with Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, and others,” said Centre for Inquiry spokesperson Paul Fidalgo, whose organisation is in the process of merging with Dawkins' Foundation for Reason & Science. “So it’s certainly not a breathtaking revelation that fewer than 40 scientists out of 137 – culled from a pool of over 20,000 – might not be fans of Prof. Dawkins’ particular approach to science communication. Comes with the territory.
“What is indisputable is that the work of Richard Dawkins has educated and inspired many millions of people around the world, spanning generations, cultures, languages, and beliefs. His life’s work has been to open our minds to the beauty of science, and to challenge all of us to question even our most closely held beliefs. He has been instrumental in demolishing the taboo around atheism, helping to bring nonbelievers into the mainstream of public discourse.
“It’s fine that some bristle at his style, no one can appeal to everybody, but I can say without reservation that the public appreciation of science, reason, and free inquiry has benefited enormously from the work of Richard Dawkins.”
Dawkins has been publicly criticised by colleagues before. In 2014, Harvard professor EO Wilson said that Dawkins wasn’t a scientist at all, instead calling him a “journalist” and implying that he didn’t do any work of his own.
“There is no dispute between me and Richard Dawkins and there never has been, because he’s a journalist, and journalists are people that report what the scientists have found and the arguments I’ve had have actually been with scientists doing research,” said Wilson during an interview on Newsnight.
Dawkins tweeted soon after to say that he had actually done new work and that the argument was the result of a specific disagreement.
“I greatly admire EO Wilson & his huge contributions to entomology, ecology, biogeography, conservation, etc. He’s just wrong on kin selection,” Mr Dawkins wrote on Twitter. “Anybody who thinks I’m a journalist who reports what other scientists think is invited to read The Extended Phenotype,” he wrote in a follow-up tweet, making reference to the sequel to his seminal book The Selfish Gene.
It is Twitter that has led to many of the controversies that Dawkins has been embroiled in. A Guardian article last year reported that some people close to Dawkins were worried that his online outbursts could be destroying his reputation.
Why Atheist Richard Dawkins Supports Religious Education in Schools
By Laura Geggel June 12, 2017 Human Nature
Richard Dawkins, founder of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, talks about his work at an event in Sydney, Australia, in 2014. (Image: © Don Arnold/Getty Images)
Despite his criticism of intelligent design and creationism, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins told people at a science festival this past the weekend that he believes religious education is a key subject for schoolchildren.
Dawkins, who is open about his atheism, said that understanding religion can help students get a better grasp of the world's history and culture. He made the statement during a public conversation at the Cheltenham Science Festival in Gloucestershire, England, on Sunday (June 11), according to The Telegraph.
It's basically impossible to study English literature without some knowledge of Christianity, Dawkins noted. [Saint or Spiritual Slacker? Test Your Religious Knowledge]
Dawkins is the author of several books, including "The Selfish Gene" (Oxford University Press, 1976), in which he talks about how genes associated with self-interested survival drive evolution; the 2006 best-seller "The God Delusion"; and his forthcoming book, "Science in the Soul" (Random House, August 2017).
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Dawkins touched on religious education after being asked whether schools should stop teaching the subject due of fears that it result in children accepting religious doctrine without questioning it.
But, after stating his support for the subject — at least for historical and cultural purposes — he warned that it was "deeply wicked" and "evil" to use religion to scare children by saying that they could end up in "hell fire," Dawkins said, according to The Telegraph.
He also said that scientists should stop using the phrase "theory of evolution," largely because the term "theory" could lead people to think that it was not scientifically proven, he said, according to The Telegraph.
"I would recommend not calling it a theory, I would call it a fact," he said at the festival. "The word 'theory' is clearly misunderstood. Evolution is a fact and there is absolutely no question or doubt about that. Look at the evidence — it is overwhelming."
He added that Darwin used the term in the 19th century, "fair enough, but it is a fact, it is established as strongly as any other fact in science … It’s much better to abandon the word 'theory' altogether. Don't ever use the word theory of evolution."
Original article on Live Science.
Richard Dawkins planning atheism books for children and teens to stop 'religious indoctrination'
Staff writer Fri 24 Aug 2018 17:06 BST
Atheist author Richard Dawkins appears in a screen capture of a YouTube video from Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science.YouTube/Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science
Famed atheist Richard Dawkins continues to see belief in God as a threat to humanity and his latest effort to counter it is more books about atheism. But this time, it's not adults he wants to speak to but children and teenagers.
According to recent tweets, the scientist and 'God Delusion' author has two new books in the pipeline, Outgrowing God, which will be about atheism for teenagers, and a second one with the working title of 'Atheism for Children' that will be illustrated.
He explained in tweets this week that his 'Atheism for Children' book is not intended to be a storybook.
'My "Atheism for Children" book will be unflinching, not a storybook: children won't beg parents to buy it for Xmas. Are there parents who'll want to buy it for their children anyway? Do you anticipate a demand? Would you like to see a "children's God Delusion" by me published?' he said.
He then explained in another tweet that his goal was to arm parents against religious indoctrination by schools and grandparents.
'I really want to not indoctrinate. Perhaps I can help parents arm them against indoctrination by schools, g'parents & religious books. & against taunting by religious schoolmates. Help them think on evidence, e.g. for evolution. "What do you think?" is my continual refrain,' he said.
The 77-year-old has been the unofficial face of the atheist movement since his bestselling book, 'The God Delusion,' came out in 2006.
He has continued to rail against religion and belief in God, although he recently made some surprisingly positive comments about Christianity, saying it was the world's 'best defence' against extremist forms of religion and that it may give way to 'something worse' if it disappears completely.
'Before we rejoice at the death throes of the relatively benign Christian religion, let's not forget Hilaire Belloc's menacing rhyme: "Always keep a-hold of nurse For fear of finding something worse,"' Dawkins wrote in a recent tweet.
In other comments, he said: 'There are no Christians, as far as I know, blowing up buildings. I am not aware of any Christian suicide bombers. I am not aware of any major Christian denomination that believes the penalty for apostasy is death. I have mixed feelings about the decline of Christianity, in so far as Christianity might be a bulwark against something worse.'
QUOTE:
there's plenty of food for thought here.
Dawkins sings to the choir, though like-minded unbelievers will find ample support for their beliefs--or lack thereof.
Dawkins, Richard OUTGROWING GOD Random House (Adult Nonfiction) $27.00 9, 17 ISBN: 978-1-984853-91-2
Atheist proselyte and biologist Dawkins (Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist, 2017, etc.) sounds well-tested themes against the existence of supreme beings.
In the author's view, religion is a species of "pigeon-like superstition," something that parents tell children because their parents told them things were how they were because--well, because some god or gods made them so. In times past, we might have believed in pixies, sprites, or Olympian gods; now monotheistic strains of religion are the order of the day. Once a person learns about natural selection, writes Dawkins, things change. When it becomes clear that human DNA is, among other things, "a set of instructions for how to build a baby," then some of the old mystery wears off and the thinking adult finds no need for belief in invisible deities. Dawkins scores some good points, observing, for instance, monotheism as practiced by Christianity and Islam is "rather suspect," since its belief in an almost equal but opposite devil is ipso facto polytheistic, and the whole trinity thing of Christianity "sounds like a formula for squeezing polytheism into monotheism." The author's dismissal of religion, to say nothing of religious impulses, may well strike some readers as cavalier. And in some ways, his reasoning has not evolved substantially since he, as a former Church of England lad, decided that if he had been born to Vikings, he would be worshipping Odin, and if to Jewish parents, he would still be awaiting the messiah. In the end, Dawkins characterizes religion as fake news, the kind of thing that the internet proves daily--namely, that "people simply make stuff up." A little Dawkins-ian snark--believers believe because "they aren't well educated in science"--goes a long way, but there's plenty of food for thought here.
Dawkins sings to the choir, though like-minded unbelievers will find ample support for their beliefs--or lack thereof.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Dawkins, Richard: OUTGROWING GOD." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2019. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A591279031/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ba2a4152. Accessed 12 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A591279031
QUOTE:
contempt for sloppy thinking doesn't extend to the social realm."
"Dawkins's pedantic tone and notable blind spots notwithstanding, his writings on evolution are worth reading and make for a satisfying introduction to one of today's most prominent scientific thinkers."
Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist
Richard Dawkins. Random House, $28 (320p) ISBN 978-0-399-59224-9
In this assemblage of assorted texts, British evolutionary biologist and polemicist Dawkins (Brief Candle in the Dark) mixes his personal delight that humans have discovered the truth about so much of nature with frustration that the rational search for truth remains a minority approach. Whether he's administering a respectful rebuke to Prince Charles for a speech full of fashionable antiscience, praising Charles Darwin, or satirizing an article by former prime minister Tony Blair promoting his foundation aimed at encouraging religious faith, Dawkins never conceals his love of good explanations and his contempt for sloppy thinking. Unfortunately, that contempt for sloppy thinking doesn't extend to the social realm, where Dawkins often comes across as being as confused by politics, culture, and society (for example, his failure to understand why Barack Obama might identify as black) as he is knowledgeable about genetics. Dawkins's pedantic tone and notable blind spots notwithstanding, his writings on evolution are worth reading and make for a satisfying introduction to one of today's most prominent scientific thinkers. Agent: John Brockman, Brockman Inc. (Aug.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist." Publishers Weekly, 12 June 2017, p. 56+. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495720711/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c0d8bad6. Accessed 12 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495720711
QUOTE:
For Dawkins fans, a must-have collection of scattered speeches and writings; for foes, more grist for the mill
Dawkins, Richard SCIENCE IN THE SOUL Random House (Adult Nonfiction) $28.00 8, 8 ISBN: 978-0-399-59224-9
Combative, contrarian scientist Dawkins (Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science, 2015, etc.) gathers work from across a range of scholarly and secular interests.Is there such a thing as objective truth? If there is, it will come through the vehicle of science, and, the author responds in an Oxford lecture, anyone who argues that we make our own truth is guilty of promulgating "fashionable prattlings." He adds that anti-scientific posturing is the gateway to a new Dark Ages, noting that even if Newtonian physics is only an approximation and Einstein's theory of relativity is subject to revision, that "does not lower them into the same league as medieval witchcraft or tribal superstition." There is a touch of the straw man, and perhaps of the ethnocentric, in the author's ill temper, but he backs his opinions on science and society with hard-edged research while he offers some interesting thought experiments on how science might be applied to life--not just in getting lights to turn on and planes to fly, but in improving the truth of the judicial system by operating jury proceedings as if they were replicable lab tests: "My guess is that if the two-jury experiment were run over by a large number of trials, the frequency with which the two groups would agree on a verdict would run at slightly higher than 50 percent." Dawkins does not disappoint on the religion front, in which he has become known as a leading light of intellectual atheism (or athorism, as he posits in a satirical note on the worship of Norse gods). He lampoons creationism, the 6,000-year-old Earth, and the "time-consuming, wealth-consuming, hostility-provoking, fecundity-forfeiting rituals of religion." Ever the Darwinist, he pauses along the way to ponder what possible adaptive purpose religion can have, questioning whether it might be a species of dominance hierarchy, a holier-than-thou pecking order, among other postulations. For Dawkins fans, a must-have collection of scattered speeches and writings; for foes, more grist for the mill.
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Dawkins, Richard: SCIENCE IN THE SOUL." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2017. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A493329198/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=328023d4. Accessed 12 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A493329198
QUOTE:
concise, provocative guide to thinking for yourself
Richard Dawkins’ New Book, “Outgrowing God,” Brings Atheism to Younger Readers
By Hemant Mehta
July 8, 2019
Richard Dawkins‘ latest book Outgrowing God: A Beginner’s Guide is now available for pre-order. Think of it as The God Delusion, but for a teenage audience.
It’s not surprising for the author of a book that sold millions of copies to milk that cow and write a children’s version — and he is, in fact, working on a similar book aimed at even younger children — it makes particular sense for Dawkins to do it since he said in The God Delusion, controversially, that pushing a religious label on children is a form of mental child abuse.
The rhetoric was strong, but his point was sensible. He said the phrase “Christian child” or “Muslim child” was unfair to kids too young to understand those religions. They never subscribed to those beliefs, so why were parents foisting their faith upon them? It made as much sense as saying “This is my toddler. He’s a Republican.”
So a book about atheism, geared at people finally old enough to think for themselves, is right in his wheelhouse. According to its description, Dawkins plans to answer some of the biggest stumbling blocks young people have when they first begin to doubt their parents’ religion.
… Dawkins explains how the natural world arose without a designer — the improbability and beauty of the “bottom-up programming” that engineers an embryo or a flock of starlings — and challenges head-on some of the most basic assumptions made by the world’s religions: Do you believe in God? Which one? Is the Bible a “Good Book”? Is adhering to a religion necessary, or even likely, to make people good to one another? Dissecting everything from Abraham’s abuse of Isaac to the construction of a snowflake, Outgrowing God is a concise, provocative guide to thinking for yourself.
Just to put this out there: There’s no shortage of Christian apologists who have written books tailored to a younger audience, and the Bible itself has all kinds of children’s editions. But when Dawkins’ book comes out, you can expect Christian writers to accuse Dawkins of trying to indoctrinate children into godlessness. Even though he’s doing exactly what they do, except from a different perspective. The difference is he actually has evidence on his side.
The book is scheduled to be released in the U.S. on October 8.
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Dawkins's book ranges from parodies to polemics to ideological tributes to everybody from Charles Darwin to Carl Sagan to Christopher Hitchens, all of it rendered in gloriously spiky and opinionated prose
stack of booksWhat are you reading?
August 30, 2017
By Steve Donoghue
The challenge inherent in writing popular science books for a mainstream audience is obvious. Recent polls about scientific literacy conducted in the US, the UK, and Australia have all revealed depressing results, including, most alarmingly of all, that only roughly half of all respondents know that the Earth orbits the sun and takes a year to do it. In other words, for large swaths of the population of the modern, industrialized world, Kepler and Galileo – to say nothing of Newton, Curie, and Einstein – lived in vain, or might never have lived at all.
This reflects a massive and systematic failure in science education, and that failure creates an ever-widening gap between scientists and non-scientists. Popular science writing has always tried to close that gap, and three of the latest examples in bookstores make valiant attempts.
Astronomy magazine columnist (and science editor for "The Old Farmer's Almanac") Bob Berman, for instance, takes a jaunty, conversational approach in his new book Zapped: From Infrared to X-rays, the Curious History of Invisible Light, telling his readers right at the start that they are surrounded by his subject. “At this moment, as you sit quietly reading this book,” he writes, “you are awash in it.… You cannot see, hear, smell, or feel it, but there is never a single second when it is not flying through your body. Too much of it will kill you, but without it you wouldn't live a year.”
Berman tells readers the history of science's discovery of such things as gamma rays, cosmic rays, and ultraviolet rays, and he's an unfailingly congenial explainer, always ready with the kinds of fascinating facts his readers might have missed in school. “Did you know that a single whole-body CT scan often delivers more radiation than was received by Hiroshima survivors a mile from ground zero?” he asks. “Or that living across the street from a nuclear power plant for a full year gives you less radiation than eating a single banana?” (Bananas, it turns out, contain radioactive potassium-40).
MIT physicist Max Tegmark opts for a less collegial though no less fascinating approach in his new book, Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. The title refers to a third, as-yet hypothetical stage of life. 1.0 is simple life, “where both the hardware and the software are evolved rather than designed.” 2.0 is evolved life that can design software. And Life 3.0 would be software that could intentionally and with increasing creativity design more software – and the “would be” is a very borderline thing, thanks to the “smart” technology currently proliferating all over the world. “Life 1.0 arrived about 4 billion years ago, Life 2.0 (we humans) arrived about a hundred millennia ago, and many AI [Artificial Intelligence] researchers think that Life 3.0 may arrive during the coming century, perhaps even during our lifetime.”
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Although it's probably not his intention, much of what Tegmark writes will quietly terrify his readers. He spins scenarios in which the technology on which humans depend consults those humans less and less, preferring instead to learn, adapt, and innovate on its own – building security systems, national power grids, and medical and financial information networks, all using algorithms to change and grow, often in unpredictable ways that don't mirror humanity's own developmental path. “After all,” Tegmark writes, “why should our simplest path to a new technology be the one that evolution came up with, constrained by requirements that it be self-assembling, self-repairing and self-reproducing?” As his wife likes to point out, “The aviation industry didn't start with mechanical birds.”
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Fiercely different in its own way from either Berman's joviality or Tegmark's disquieting predictions is the approach of the third of these books, Science in the Soul, a generous anthology of the speeches, essays, and occasional writings of one of the great science popularizers of the last half-century, Richard Dawkins. In this collection, which features a large number of pieces previously unpublished in the US, editor Gillian Somerscales introduces and contextualizes 41 works by the outspoken and always-interesting author of "The Selfish Gene" and "The Ancestor's Tale," with new notes and comments supplied along the way by Dawkins himself, who strikes in these pages a passionate tone that would have been immediately recognizable to Kepler, and Galileo, and those others. “There is objective truth out there and it is our business to find it,” he writes. “There is mystery but never magic, and mysteries are all the more beautiful for being eventually explained. Things are explicable and it is our privilege to explain them.” Dawkins's book ranges from parodies to polemics to ideological tributes to everybody from Charles Darwin to Carl Sagan to Christopher Hitchens, all of it rendered in gloriously spiky and opinionated prose.
In addition to everything else they are, these three volumes constitute urgent invitations to their readership: think, learn, investigate – before it's too late.
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