|
Name: Richard Dawkins
Field:
Scientist
Productions:
An Audience With Richard Dawkins
An Audience with Dickie Bird
Biography: Professor Richard Dawkins was born in Kenya, where his father was a farmer and wartime soldier. Dawkins moved to England received a a degree in zoology from Balliol College, Oxford in 1962, where he studied under Nobel Prize winning Dutch ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen.
Dawkins was an assistant professor of zoology at University of California, Berkeley, between 1967 and 1969. He was lecturer in zoology at Oxford University, and fellow of New College, from 1970 to 1990, and later a reader in zoology, until 1995, when he became the first Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2001. He won the International Cosmos Prize (Japan) for 1997, and the Kistler Prize (USA) for 2001.
He is probably best known for his popularisation of the concept of the selfish gene , described in his book The Selfish Gene. As an ethologist, interested in animal behaviour and its relation to natural selection, he popularised the idea that the gene is the principal unit of selection in evolution.
He topped Prospect Magazine's 2004 list of the top 100 public British intellectuals, as decided by the readers, receiving twice as many votes as the runner-up.
He writes a column for Free Inquiry magazine, and since May 2005, has been a contributing blogger at The Huffington Post.
| 
