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Clinton Richard Dawkins (born March 26, 1941) is an eminent British ethologist, evolutionary theorist, and popular science writer who holds the Charles Simonyi Chair in the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University.
Dawkins first came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene which popularised the gene-centric view of evolution and introduced the term meme into the lexicon, thereby helping to found the field of memetics. In 1982, he made a major contribution to the science of evolution with the theory, presented in his book The Extended Phenotype, that phenotypic effects are not limited to an organism's body but can stretch far into the environment, including into the bodies of other organisms. He has since written several best-selling popular books on evolution and appeared in a number of television and radio programmes on evolutionary biology, creationism, and religion.
Dawkins is an outspoken atheist, humanist, sceptic, an enthusiastic bright, and – as a commentator on science, religion and politics – is among the English-speaking world's best known public intellectuals. In a play on Thomas Huxley's epithet "Darwin's bulldog", Dawkins' impassioned defence of Darwinian evolution has earned him the appellation "Darwin's rottweiler".
Dawkins was born in Nairobi, Kenya, where his father, Clinton John Dawkins, was a farmer and former wartime soldier, called up from colonial service in Nyasaland (now Malawi). Dawkins' parents came from an affluent upper-middle class background – the Dawkins name was described in Burke's Landed Gentry as "Dawkins of Over Norton". His father was a descendant of the Clinton family which held the Earldom of Lincoln, and his mother was Jean Mary Vyvyan Dawkins, née Ladner. Both were interested in the natural sciences and answered the young Dawkins' questions in more scientific than anecdotal or supernatural terms.
Dawkins describes his childhood as "a normal Anglican upbringing", but reveals that he began doubting the existence of God when he was about nine years old. He was later reconverted because he was persuaded by the argument from design, though he began to feel that the customs of the Church of England were "absurd", and had more to do with dictating morals than with God. When he was taught about evolution at the age of sixteen, his religious position again changed because he felt that evolution could account for the complexity of life in purely material terms, and thus that a designer was not necessary.
He married Marian Stamp in 1967 but they divorced in 1984. Later that year, Dawkins married Eve Barham – with whom he had a daughter, Juliet – but they too subsequently divorced. He married actress Lalla Ward in 1992. Dawkins had met her through their mutual friend Douglas Adams, who worked with Ward on the BBC TV sci-fi series Doctor Who. Ward has illustrated a number of Dawkins' books.
Dawkins moved to England with his parents at the age of eight and attended Oundle School. He then studied zoology at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was tutored by Nobel Prize-winning ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen. He gained a second class BA degree in zoology in 1962, followed by an MA and DPhil degree in 1966.
Between 1967 and 1969, Dawkins was an assistant professor of zoology at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1970 he was appointed a lecturer and then in 1990 a reader in zoology at the University of Oxford, before becoming the University's first Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science in 1995. He has been a fellow of New College, Oxford, since 1970. He has delivered a number of notable lectures and inaugural lectures, including the Henry Sidgwick Memorial Lecture (1989), first Erasmus Darwin Memorial Lecture (1990), Michael Faraday Lecture (1991), T.H. Huxley Memorial Lecture (1992), Irvine Memorial Lecture (1997), Tinbergen Lecture (2000), and the Tanner Lectures (2003).
Dawkins has edited a number of journals and has acted as editorial advisor for several publications, including Encarta Encyclopedia and the Encyclopedia of Evolution. He writes a column for the Council for Secular Humanism's Free Inquiry magazine and serves as a senior editor. He has also been president of the Biological Sciences section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and serves as advisor for several other organisations. He has sat on numerous judging panels for awards as diverse as the Royal Society's Faraday Award and the British Academy Television Awards. In 2004 the Dawkins Prize – awarded for "outstanding research into the ecology and behaviour of animals whose welfare and survival may be endangered by human activities" – was initiated by Oxford's Balliol College.
In 2005, Discover magazine referred to Dawkins as "Darwin's rottweiler", a description later adopted by the Radio Times and Channel 4, recalling the epithet "Darwin's bulldog" given to Darwin's nineteenth-century advocate Thomas Henry Huxley. He has also been called "the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell" and compared to Ernst Haeckel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins
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