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.
Teaching įrom 1967 to 1969, Dawkins was an assistant professor of zoology at the University of California, Berkeley. Tinbergen was a pioneer in the study of animal behaviour, particularly in the areas of instinct, learning, and choice Dawkins's research in this period concerned models of animal decision-making. He continued as a research student under Tinbergen's supervision, receiving his Doctor of Philosophy degree by 1966, and remained a research assistant for another year. He studied zoology at Balliol College, Oxford, graduating in 1962 while there, he was tutored by Nobel Prize-winning ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen. While at Oundle, Dawkins read Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian for the first time. On his return to England from Nyasaland in 1949, at the age of eight, Dawkins joined Chafyn Grove School, in Wiltshire, and after that from 1954 to 1959 attended Oundle School in Northamptonshire, an English public school with a Church of England ethos, where he was in Laundimer House. And that left me with nothing." This understanding of atheism combined with his western cultural background, informs Dawkins as he describes himself in several interviews as a " cultural Christian" and a "cultural Anglican". 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. He embraced Christianity until halfway through his teenage years, at which point he concluded that the theory of evolution alone was a better explanation for life's complexity, and ceased believing in a god. Dawkins describes his childhood as "a normal Anglican upbringing". His parents were interested in natural sciences, and they answered Dawkins's questions in scientific terms. His father had inherited a country estate, Over Norton Park in Oxfordshire, which he farmed commercially. His father was called up into the King's African Rifles during the Second World War and returned to England in 1949, when Dawkins was eight. He is the son of Jean Mary Vyvyan ( née Ladner 1916–2019) and Clinton John Dawkins (1915–2010), an agricultural civil servant in the British Colonial Service in Nyasaland (present-day Malawi), of an Oxfordshire landed gentry family. Dawkins later dropped Clinton from his name by deed poll. Ĭlinton Richard Dawkins was born on 26 March 1941 in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya during British colonial rule. ĭawkins 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. Dawkins's atheist stances have sometimes attracted controversy. In The God Delusion (2006), Dawkins contends that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that religious faith is a delusion. Instead, he describes evolutionary processes as analogous to a blind watchmaker, in that reproduction, mutation, and selection are unguided by any designer.
In The Blind Watchmaker (1986), Dawkins argues against the watchmaker analogy, an argument for the existence of a supernatural creator based upon the complexity of living organisms. In 2006, he founded the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. 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. ĭawkins first came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which popularised the gene-centred view of evolution and introduced the term meme. An atheist, he is well known for his criticism of creationism and intelligent design. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was Professor for Public Understanding of Science in the University of Oxford from 1995 to 2008. Richard Dawkins FRS FRSL (born 26 March 1941) is a British evolutionary biologist and author.