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Richard Dawkins

Also known as C. Dawkins, C. Richard Dawkins, Clinton Dawkins, CR Dawkins, Clinton Richard Dawkins, R. Dawkins

English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author (born 1941)

OverviewAI-generated

Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, ethologist, science communicator, and essayist born in Nairobi in 1941. A citizen of the United Kingdom, he was educated at Balliol College, University of Oxford, under doctoral advisor Niko Tinbergen. His professional career includes positions at the University of Oxford and the University of California, Berkeley. He is a member of the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Literature, having received the Kistler Prize, the Michael Faraday Prize, and the International Cosmos Prize.

Dawkins is the author of notable works including The Selfish Gene and The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. His field of work encompasses ethology, evolutionary biology, zoology, and biology, and he has been influenced by Charles Darwin, Ronald Fisher, Bertrand Russell, and Daniel Dennett. He has been associated with movements such as atheism, secularism, and agnosticism. He has been married to Marian Stamp Dawkins and Lalla Ward.

Synthesized by Vinony from 45 facts across 10 sources: Wikidata, Crossref, Open Library, MusicBrainz, Last.fm, TMDb, Wikiquote, Firecrawl, Vinony collections, Vinony graph. Generated from structured data (not the Wikipedia text) and checked against those facts — may still contain errors.

Person · Open Library

Born: 26 March 1941
Works: 131

Top works

International Cosmos Prize, 1997
The Selfish Gene
Cogento
Abstracts of papers presented at the 1990 meeting on Evolution
What Are You Optimistic About?

via Open Library + Wikidata

Film & TV

Acting · Nairobi, Kenya Colony

Clinton Richard Dawkins, FRS, FRSL (born 26 March 1941), known as Richard Dawkins, is a 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 came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which popularised the gene-centered…

Known for

Science Friction — Self2022
Great Minds — Self2021
Intersect — Q42 / Computer2020
La entrevista de — Self2019
The Fool — Self (archive footage)2018
Losing Our Religion — Self2017
Ex Libris: The New York Public Library — Self2017
Supersapiens: the Rise of the Mind — Self2017
The Atheist Delusion — Self (archive footage)2016
Beware the Slenderman — Self2016

via TMDB

Music · MusicBrainz

Type: Person
Gender: Male
Origin: United Kingdom
Active from: 1941

britishenglishhas german audiobooksuk

Official site Discogs

via MusicBrainz · CC0

Listeners · Last.fm

Listeners: 13,586
Total plays: 285,045

Recent publications · Crossref

5 total works indexed

The Measurement of Observer Agreement for Categorical Data
· 1977 · cited 63,319x
The Sequence Alignment/Map format and SAMtools
· 2009 · cited 59,210x
Fast and accurate short read alignment with Burrows–Wheeler transform
· 2009 · cited 47,632x
ImageNet: A large-scale hierarchical image database
· 2009 · cited 47,223x
Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold
· 2021 · cited 43,543x

via Crossref · CC0

Quotes

“Just because science can't in practice explain things like the love that motivates a poet to write a sonnet, that doesn't mean that religion can. It's a simple and logical fallacy to say, 'If science can't do something, therefore religion can'.”
“Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.”
“What worries me about religion is that it teaches people to be satisfied with not understanding the world they live in.”
“"The wheel may be one of those cases where the engineering solution can be seen in plain view, yet be unattainable in evolution because it lies [on] the other side of a deep valley, cutting unbridgeably across the massif of Mount Improbable."”
“The popularity of the paranormal, oddly enough, might even be grounds for encouragement. I think that the appetite for mystery, the enthusiasm for that which we do not understand, is healthy and to be fostered. It is the same appetite which drives the best of true science, and it is an appetite which true science is best qualified to satisfy.”
“It is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the threat to humanity posed by the AIDS virus, "mad cow" disease, and many others, but I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.”

via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA

Official website

Just a moment...

richarddawkins.net →

Link to the official site · 477 chars · not written by Vinony

Wikidata facts

Instance of: human
Gender: male
Citizenship: United Kingdom
Place of birth: Nairobi
Occupation: voice actor
Position held: professor
Languages spoken: English language
Religion: atheism
Award: honorary doctorate
Notable work: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution
Academic degree: Doctor of Philosophy
Doctoral advisor: Niko Tinbergen
Student of: Niko Tinbergen
Doctoral student: Alan Grafen
Movement: agnosticism
Official website: richarddawkins.com
Image: Dinner with Richard Dawkins and CFI... like a candle in the dark.jpg
Residence: Oxford

Show 16 more facts

Commons category: Richard Dawkins
member of: Royal Society of Literature
date of birth: 1941-03-26
topic's main category: Category:Richard Dawkins
Commons gallery: Richard Dawkins
influenced by: George Christopher Williams
student: Mark Ridley
ethnic group: British
Academia.edu profile URL: independent.academia.edu/RichardDawkins
topic has template: Template:Richard Dawkins
writing language: English language
social media followers: 379000
name in native language: Clinton Richard Dawkins
short name: Richard Dawkins
birth name: Clinton Richard Dawkins
different from: Richard Dawson

Sources (14)

via Wikidata · CC0

~40 min read

Encyclopedic overview

Richard Dawkins (born 26 March 1941) is a British evolutionary biologist, zoologist, science communicator and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford. In 1995, he was named the first Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, a position he held until 2008, and is on the advisory board of the University of Austin. Dawkins has won several academic and writing awards, among them the 2005 Shakespeare Prize and the 2006 Lewis Thomas Prize. Presenting the latter, Paul Nurse said "In eloquent, evocative prose, Richard Dawkins conveys the certainty that, rather than diminishing the myriad beauties of the universe and extinguishing wonderment at its mysteries, science reveals truths that are yet more awe-inspiring than the mysteries they solve."

Dawkins has written a number of popular books explicating evolution. In The Selfish Gene (1976), he espoused the gene-centred view of evolution and coined the word meme. In The Blind Watchmaker (1986), he explains how the cumulative, non-random process of natural selection, coupled with random variation, creates complexity. In Climbing Mount Improbable (1996), he explores how evolution gradually creates complex adaptations through a series of intermediates. The book grew out of his Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, Growing Up in the Universe. With Yan Wong, he co-authored The Ancestor's Tale (2004), a "Chaucerian pilgrimage to the dawn of life".

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Richard Dawkins” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.