Portal:University of Oxford/Selected biography/8

Richard Dawkins (born 1941) is a British biological theorist with a background in ethology. He is a popular science author focusing on evolution. He came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which popularised the gene-centred view of evolution. In 1982, he developed this view in The Extended Phenotype: The Gene as the Unit of Selection, emphasizing that the phenotypic effects of genes are not necessarily limited to an organism's body but can stretch via biochemistry and behaviour into other organisms and the environment. Dawkins is a prominent critic of religion, creationism and pseudoscience. In his 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker, he argued against the watchmaker analogy, an argument for the existence of a supernatural creator based upon the complexity of living organisms. Instead, he described a dysteleological perspective on the process of evolution by natural selection as "blind", without a design or a goal. In his 2006 million-selling book The God Delusion, he contended that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist, writing that such beliefs, based on faith rather than on evidence, qualify as a delusion. Dawkins retired from his position at Oxford University in 2008. (more...)