Richard Dawkins

Clinton Richard Dawkins was born on March 26, 1941 in Nairobi, where he lived until the age of 8. And while he was surrounded by nature in its most lucid form, he never really took an interest in the flora and fauna around him. He went on to study zoology at Balliol College, Oxford but his interest stemmed not from a love for animals, but because he believed he could unravel the mysteries of life by looking at how animals came to be. He is a biologist who maintains a safe distance from experimental biology and instead has chosen to dip his foot in the philosophical side of what biology has to offer.

The driving force behind evolution had been something that had been debated about for a long time, and the most popular school of thought at the time stated that natural selection took place at the ‘organism level’. But in his book ‘The Selfish Gene’ published in 1976, Dawkins very elegantly rectified misconceptions regarding ‘Darwinism’ and in the process managed to put forth the most compelling argument that it was in fact the gene, and not the organism, that was the most fundamental unit of evolution. The book was written in a very digestible manner that even a layman could understand and brought about a paradigm shift in evolutionary biology.

Going further to spread his ideals on ‘Darwinism’, he went on to write books like ‘The Blind Watchmaker’ (which won him the Royal Society of Literature Award in 1987) and other notable works like ‘The Extended Phenotype’ and ‘The River Out of Eden’. Another interesting read is ‘The Magic of Reality: How We Know What’s Really True’, a book for young readers that compares the scientific explanations of various phenomena to the ones given by mythology. Memes have become a part and parcel of our life this lockdown, something this to get us through the monotonous days. But have you ever wondered who coined this term? “We need a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. 'Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene'. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. It should be pronounced to rhyme with 'cream'.”, writes Richard Dawkins in his book ‘The Selfish Gene’.

Dawkins was named a fellow of the Royal Society in 2001, after which he set out on a very different mission. It started with the book he published in 2006 by the name ‘The God Delusion’ that probed the logical drawbacks in religious belief and declared that the existence of an omnipotent being was statistically improbable. In the same year, he launched the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, an organization that fostered the acceptance of atheism and aimed at finding scientific answers to the mysteries of life. He also produced television documentaries like ‘The Enemies of Reason’ and ‘The Root of Evil?’ in an attempt to further promote atheism.

Dawkins has written two volumes of memoirs, one recording his life before ‘The Selfish Gene’ and one recording his life after which are, ‘An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist’ in 2013 and ‘Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science’ in 2015 respectively.