page_title: Richard Dawkins
hierarchical_section_title: Richard Dawkins
caption_attribution_description: English: Richard Dawkins at New York City's Cooper Union to discuss his book The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution
context_page_description: Richard Dawkins FRS FRSL is an British 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, 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, 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.
context_section_description: Richard Dawkins FRS FRSL (born Clinton Richard Dawkins; 26 March 1941) is an British 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 academic and writing awards, and he makes television, radio, and Internet appearances, predominantly discussing his books, atheism, and his ideas and opinions as a public intellectual.
caption: Richard Dawkins in September 2010
exif: {"Image XResolution": "96", "Image YResolution": "96", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "GIMP 2.10.18", "Image DateTime": "2020:04:08 20:18:56", "Image ExifOffset": "136", "Thumbnail ImageWidth": "204", "Thumbnail ImageLength": "256", "Thumbnail BitsPerSample": "[8, 8, 8]", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail PhotometricInterpretation": "6", "Thumbnail SamplesPerPixel": "3", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "262", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "6510", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB"}