Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins is a British evolutionary biologist and zoologist who writes about science. Born in Nairobi, he studied zoology at Balliol College, Oxford, under Nikolaas Tinbergen and completed his doctorate in the mid-1960s. After teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, he returned to Oxford in 1970 as a lecturer, later becoming a reader; in 1995 he was named the first holder of a professorship at Oxford dedicated to public understanding of science, a post he held from 1995 until 2008. His books include The Selfish Gene (1976), which put forward a gene-centered view of evolution and introduced the word meme, The Blind Watchmaker (1986), Climbing Mount Improbable (1996), and The Ancestor's Tale (2004). He received the Shakespeare Prize in 2005 and the Lewis Thomas Prize in 2006. On screen he appeared in the documentaries Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (2008) and The Unbelievers (2013), and provided the voice of a computer in Intersect (2020).