# Richard Dawkins British evolutionary biologist and ethologist (b. 1941); Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford (1995-2008); the most-recognized popular advocate of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory and the most-cited "New Atheist" of the 2000s. Dawkins coined the term *meme* (1976) and developed the "selfish gene" framework that reframes evolution as gene-level rather than organism-level competition. From the late 1990s onward he has positioned himself increasingly as an atheist polemicist, with *The God Delusion* (2006) becoming the public face of the New Atheist movement alongside Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett (the "Four Horsemen"). ## Biography - **1941**, Born in Nairobi, Kenya, to British colonial parents - **1959-1966**, Balliol College, Oxford (BA, MA, DPhil under Nobel laureate Niko Tinbergen) - **1967-1969**, University of California, Berkeley - **1970-1995**, Lecturer / Reader, University of Oxford - **1995-2008**, Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, Oxford (endowed chair specifically for science communication) - **2006**, Co-founder of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science - **2008-present**, Emeritus, continued public-intellectual work, podcasts, debates ## Major works ### Evolutionary biology - *The Selfish Gene* (1976), the foundational popular-science statement of gene-centric evolution; introduced *meme* - *The Extended Phenotype* (1982), Dawkins's most rigorous scholarly work; extends gene-selection logic to organism-environment effects - *The Blind Watchmaker* (1986), direct refutation of William Paley's design argument; the title is a deliberate reversal of Paley's watchmaker analogy - *Climbing Mount Improbable* (1996), cumulative selection as the answer to "irreducible complexity" - *The Ancestor's Tale* (2004), phylogenetic survey of evolutionary history backwards from humans - *The Greatest Show on Earth* (2009), survey of the evidence for evolution ### Atheist apologetics - *The God Delusion* (2006), the bestselling New Atheist text; argues God's existence is a scientific hypothesis with low probability, that religion does net harm, and that children should not be religiously labeled - *The Magic of Reality* (2011), popular science for younger audiences - *Outgrowing God* (2019), youth-targeted version of the deconversion case ## Major positions ### 1. Gene-level selection (the selfish-gene paradigm) In *The Selfish Gene*, Dawkins reframed evolution from the level of organisms (Darwin's typical framing) to the level of *genes*, the replicators that organisms transiently carry. Phenotypes (organisms, behaviors) exist because their underlying genes built effective vehicles. The framework has been mainstream evolutionary biology for ~50 years, though group-selection accounts (E. O. Wilson, David Sloan Wilson) have re-emerged as competitors. ### 2. Cumulative selection as answer to design Throughout his work, most explicitly in *The Blind Watchmaker* and *Climbing Mount Improbable*, Dawkins argues that natural selection operating in *cumulative steps* (each step retained when fitness-improving) can build apparently designed complexity without intelligence. The argument bears directly on Paley's watchmaker, [William Lane Craig](/codex/william-lane-craig/)'s fine-tuning argument, and Michael Behe's irreducible-complexity argument. Christian responses (Behe *Darwin's Black Box*, Stephen Meyer *Darwin's Doubt*, Plantinga's EAAN, see [Alvin Plantinga](/codex/alvin-plantinga/)) target either: - The empirical sufficiency of cumulative selection in specific cases (bacterial flagellum, blood-clotting cascade) - The information-theoretic adequacy of mutation + selection to produce coded biological information - The metaphysical question of why physical-law constants permit any biology at all (fine-tuning) ### 3. Theistic argument as scientific hypothesis In *The God Delusion*, Dawkins treats theism as an empirical scientific claim and argues: - A creator God complex enough to design the universe would itself require explanation (the "Boeing 747 gambit") - Religious belief is best explained as a misfiring of evolved cognitive byproducts - Religion is on net socially harmful The "Boeing 747 gambit" (who designed the designer?) is the most-engaged Christian-philosophical objection to the book. Christian philosophers (Plantinga, [William Lane Craig](/codex/william-lane-craig/), Edward Feser) reply that: - Classical theism affirms divine *simplicity*, God is not a composed complex artifact whose existence requires further explanation - The argument confuses the explanation of *contingent things* (which require external grounding) with the explanation of *necessary being* (which does not) - Treating God as a "scientific hypothesis" misframes classical natural theology, which treats God's existence as a metaphysical conclusion of contingency / causation / fine-tuning rather than an empirical conjecture ### 4. The meme In *The Selfish Gene*'s final chapter, Dawkins coined *meme*, a unit of cultural transmission analogous to a gene, opening a research program (memetics) that has had mixed scholarly reception but enormous popular cultural influence (the term now denotes internet jokes generally). ### 5. Religious cognition as evolutionary byproduct Dawkins (with Daniel Dennett, Pascal Boyer, Scott Atran) treats religious belief as a *byproduct* of cognitive faculties evolved for other purposes (agency-detection, theory-of-mind, attachment). This "cognitive science of religion" framework is shared with theistic researchers (Justin Barrett, *Born Believers*) who reframe the same data as a *sensus divinitatis* (cf. [Alvin Plantinga](/codex/alvin-plantinga/)). ## Honest concessions in the corpus In *The Blind Watchmaker* and elsewhere, Dawkins concedes that biological structures *appear* designed: > Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose. In *The Greatest Show on Earth* and interviews, Dawkins concedes the origin of the first replicator (abiogenesis) is currently unexplained, though he expects a naturalistic explanation. This concession is what ris3n's note leverages. ## Connection to codex concepts (added 2026-04-28 bulk extraction) The 2026-04-28 ยง5.4 extraction built concept hubs in which Dawkins functions as the named New-Atheist foil, across faith-based parenting, religion-and-violence, scientism, and reformed-epistemology pages: - [Faith-Based Parenting](/codex/faith-based-parenting/), Dawkins's *The God Delusion* ch. 9 ("Childhood, Abuse and the Escape from Religion") is the primary opponent voice; the page's data and argument explicitly refute the Dawkins child-abuse framing - [Religion Causes Violence Objection](/codex/religion-causes-violence-objection/), Dawkins's *The God Delusion* (2006) cited for the "religion is a uniquely dangerous superstition" claim that the page rebuts via Phillips/Axelrod data - [Atheist Regime Body Count](/codex/atheist-regime-body-count/), Dawkins named among major debate participants on this topic - [Scientism](/codex/scientism/), Dawkins's *The God Delusion* and *The Blind Watchmaker* listed among proponents of scientistic stances Moreland critiques - [Critical Thinking Christian Framework](/codex/critical-thinking-christian-framework/), Dawkins's *The God Delusion* (2006) cited; the New Atheist "appeal to reason / evidence / science" engaged as the canonical opponent stance the framework responds to - [Reformed Epistemology](/codex/reformed-epistemology/), Dawkins's atheist evidentialism ("Christians must defend their belief with positive evidence") cited as the canonical position RE rejects as itself an unargued epistemological commitment ## See also - [Bart Ehrman](/codex/bart-ehrman/), companion popular-academic critic in NT scholarship - [David Hume](/codex/david-hume/), classical philosophical forebear of much New Atheist argumentation - [Alvin Plantinga](/codex/alvin-plantinga/), *Where the Conflict Really Lies* directly engages Dawkins on naturalism / evolution - [Eugene Koonin](/codex/eugene-koonin/), evolutionary biologist whose own probability calculations about origin-of-life undermine Dawkinsian optimism - [Cosmological Argument](/codex/cosmological-arguments/), the Boeing-747 gambit targets variants of this argument - [Fine-Tuning Argument](/codex/fine-tuning-argument/), Dawkins's "multiverse" appeal is the standard naturalist response - [Argument from the Reliability of Reason](/codex/argument-from-the-reliability-of-reason/), Plantinga's EAAN directly targets Dawkins's naturalism + evolution - Hubs Roadmap