Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins (b. 1941) is an English evolutionary biologist and secular humanist intellectual. Though he has made major contributions to the field of evolutionary biology, he is probably best known for his advocacy for atheism.

Professionally, he was trained in zoology at Balliol College, Oxford, where he completed his doctoral research. His blockbuster scientific work, The Selfish Gene, published in 1976, argued that genes, rather than organisms, are the primary units of evolution. Genes are “selfish” because they may favor their own survival over that of an organism. This idea has been very influential in evolutionary biology.

More controversially, Dawkins applies this idea to any self-replicating unit. A religion, for example, replicates by conversion and may displace another religion in a population. It may also be modified by changes in its environment and pass these changes along to future converts. Dawkins called such evolving cultural units “memes” (and, yes, his ideas are why we call silly online images “memes”).

Dawkins is better known to the public, however, as a public intellectual, advocate for secular humanism, and opponent of religion. His 2006 The God Delusion was a bestseller and put him in the spotlight as a “New Atheist.” Philosophical materialism is central to his work, the idea that nothing exists apart from matter and that evolution is a fully sufficient explanation for our world and our experiences of it. His arguments largely rely on the idea that, once understood, unguided evolution removes any need to posit the existence of a God. The other part of his work, which grounds his activism against religion, is that he sees religion as a net negative influence on the world, perhaps analogous to a cognitive virus in the human population.