Richard Dawking

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.

Richard Dawkins (born 26 March 1941) is a British evolutionary biologist and author.

Dawkins was born Clinton Richard Dawkins on 26 March 1941 in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya during British colonial rule.

He later dropped Clinton from his name by deed poll.

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.

His father had inherited a country estate, Over Norton Park in Oxfordshire, which he farmed commercially.

Dawkins lives in Oxford, England.

He has a younger sister, Sarah.

His parents were interested in natural sciences, and they answered Dawkins's questions in scientific terms.

Dawkins describes his childhood as "a normal Anglican upbringing".

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.

He 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."

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".

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.

While at Oundle, Dawkins read Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian for the first time.

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 upper-second class honours.

Dawkins 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.

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.

From 1967 to 1969, Dawkins 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.

He returned to the University of Oxford in 1970 as a lecturer.

Since 1970, he has been a fellow of New College, Oxford, and he is now an emeritus fellow.

His 1976 book The Selfish Gene popularised the gene-centred view of evolution, as well as coining the term meme.

Dawkins has won several academic and writing awards.

Dawkins is well known for his criticism of creationism and intelligent design as well as for being a vocal atheist.

Dawkins wrote The Blind Watchmaker in 1986, arguing 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 sentient designer.

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 Tinbergen Lecture (2004), and the Tanner Lectures (2003).

In 1990, he became a reader in zoology.

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 an 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.

Dawkins has sat on judging panels for awards as diverse as the Royal Society's Faraday Award and the British Academy Television Awards, and has been president of the Biological Sciences section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

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.

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", and that its first holder should be Richard Dawkins.

He held that professorship from 1995 until 2008.

In 2006, Dawkins published The God Delusion, writing that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that religious faith is a delusion.

He founded the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science in 2006.

Dawkins has published two volumes of memoirs, An Appetite for Wonder (2013) and Brief Candle in the Dark (2015).