Richard Dawkins Popular Books

Richard Dawkins Biography & Facts

Richard Dawkins (born 26 March 1941) is a British evolutionary biologist and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was Professor for Public Understanding of Science in the University of Oxford from 1995 to 2008. His 1976 book The Selfish Gene popularised the gene-centred view of evolution, as well as coining the term meme. Dawkins has won several academic and writing awards.Dawkins is well known for his criticism of creationism and intelligent design as well as for being a vocal atheist. Dawkins wrote The Blind Watchmaker in 1986, arguing against the watchmaker analogy, an argument for the existence of a supernatural creator based upon the complexity of living organisms. Instead, he describes evolutionary processes as analogous to a blind watchmaker, in that reproduction, mutation, and selection are unguided by any sentient designer. In 2006, Dawkins published The God Delusion, writing that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that religious faith is a delusion. He founded the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science in 2006. Dawkins has published two volumes of memoirs, An Appetite for Wonder (2013) and Brief Candle in the Dark (2015). Background Early life Dawkins was born Clinton Richard Dawkins on 26 March 1941 in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya during British colonial rule. He later dropped Clinton from his name by deed poll. He is the son of Jean Mary Vyvyan (née Ladner; 1916–2019) and Clinton John Dawkins (1915–2010), an agricultural civil servant in the British Colonial Service in Nyasaland (present-day Malawi), of an Oxfordshire landed gentry family. His father was called up into the King's African Rifles during the Second World War and returned to England in 1949, when Dawkins was eight. His father had inherited a country estate, Over Norton Park in Oxfordshire, which he farmed commercially. Dawkins lives in Oxford, England. He has a younger sister, Sarah.His parents were interested in natural sciences, and they answered Dawkins's questions in scientific terms. Dawkins describes his childhood as "a normal Anglican upbringing". He embraced Christianity until halfway through his teenage years, at which point he concluded that the theory of evolution alone was a better explanation for life's complexity, and ceased believing in a god. He states: "The main residual reason why I was religious was from being so impressed with the complexity of life and feeling that it had to have a designer, and I think it was when I realised that Darwinism was a far superior explanation that pulled the rug out from under the argument of design. And that left me with nothing." This understanding of atheism combined with his western cultural background, informs Dawkins as he describes himself in several interviews as a "cultural Christian" and a "cultural Anglican". Education On his return to England from Nyasaland in 1949, at the age of eight, Dawkins joined Chafyn Grove School, in Wiltshire, and after that from 1954 to 1959 attended Oundle School in Northamptonshire, an English public school with a Church of England ethos, where he was in Laundimer House. While at Oundle, Dawkins read Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian for the first time. He studied zoology at Balliol College, Oxford (the same college his father attended), graduating in 1962; while there, he was tutored by Nobel Prize-winning ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen. He graduated with a second-class degree.Dawkins continued as a research student under Tinbergen's supervision, receiving his Doctor of Philosophy degree by 1966, and remained a research assistant for another year. Tinbergen was a pioneer in the study of animal behaviour, particularly in the areas of instinct, learning, and choice; Dawkins's research in this period concerned models of animal decision-making. Teaching From 1967 to 1969, Dawkins was an assistant professor of zoology at the University of California, Berkeley. During this period, the students and faculty at UC Berkeley were largely opposed to the ongoing Vietnam War, and Dawkins became involved in the anti-war demonstrations and activities. He returned to the University of Oxford in 1970 as a lecturer. In 1990, he became a reader in zoology. In 1995, he was appointed Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, a position that had been endowed by Charles Simonyi with the express intention that the holder "be expected to make important contributions to the public understanding of some scientific field", and that its first holder should be Richard Dawkins. He held that professorship from 1995 until 2008.Since 1970, he has been a fellow of New College, Oxford, and he is now an emeritus fellow. He has delivered many lectures, including the Henry Sidgwick Memorial Lecture (1989), the first Erasmus Darwin Memorial Lecture (1990), the Michael Faraday Lecture (1991), the T. H. Huxley Memorial Lecture (1992), the Irvine Memorial Lecture (1997), the Tinbergen Lecture (2004), and the Tanner Lectures (2003). In 1991, he gave the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures for Children on Growing Up in the Universe. He also has edited several journals and has acted as an editorial advisor to the Encarta Encyclopedia and the Encyclopedia of Evolution. He is listed as a senior editor and a columnist of the Council for Secular Humanism's Free Inquiry magazine and has been a member of the editorial board of Skeptic magazine since its foundation.Dawkins has sat on judging panels for awards as diverse as the Royal Society's Faraday Award and the British Academy Television Awards, and has been president of the Biological Sciences section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2004, Balliol College, Oxford, instituted the Dawkins Prize, awarded for "outstanding research into the ecology and behaviour of animals whose welfare and survival may be endangered by human activities". In September 2008, he retired from his professorship, announcing plans to "write a book aimed at youngsters in which he will warn them against believing in 'anti-scientific' fairytales." In 2011, Dawkins joined the professoriate of the New College of the Humanities, a private university in London established by A. C. Grayling, which opened in September 2012. Work Evolutionary biology Dawkins is best known for his popularisation of the gene as the principal unit of selection in evolution; this view is most clearly set out in two of his books: The Selfish Gene (1976), in which he notes that "all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities." The Extended Phenotype (1982), in which he describes natural selection as "the process whereby replicators out-propagate each other". He introduces to a wider audience the influential concept he presented in 1977, that the phenotypic effects of a gene are not necessarily limited to an organism's body, but can stretch far into the environment, including the bodies of other organisms. D.... Discover the Richard Dawkins popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Richard Dawkins books.

Best Seller Richard Dawkins Books of 2024

  • A Universe from Nothing synopsis, comments

    A Universe from Nothing

    Lawrence M. Krauss

    Bestselling author and acclaimed physicist Lawrence Krauss offers a paradigmshifting view of how everything that exists came to be in the first place.“Where did the universe come f...

  • Hindu Myths synopsis, comments

    Hindu Myths

    Wendy Doniger

    Recorded in sacred Sanskrit texts, including the Rig Veda and the Mahabharata, Hindu Myths are thought to date back as far as the tenth century BCE. Here in these seventyfive semin...

  • Unthink synopsis, comments

    Unthink

    Chris Paley

    Your life is dominated by your unconscious mind: by thoughts you're unaware of and movements you don't realise you are making. Words, colours, mannerisms and other cues you don't r...

  • Fear and Trembling synopsis, comments

    Fear and Trembling

    Søren Kierkegaard & Alastair Hannay

    Kierkegaard's infamous and hugely influential philosophical work on faith, choice and sacrificeIn Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard, writing under the pseudonym Johannes de silentio, ...

  • Richard Dawkins synopsis, comments

    Richard Dawkins

    Alan Grafen & Mark Ridley

    This sparkling collection explores the impact of Richard Dawkins as scientist, rationalist, and one of the most important thinkers alive today. Leading figures from science, philos...

  • Free Will synopsis, comments

    Free Will

    Sam Harris

    From the New York Times bestselling author of The End of Faith, a thoughtprovoking, "brilliant and witty" (Oliver Sacks) look at the notion of free willand the implications that it...

  • The Greatest Story Ever Told--So Far synopsis, comments

    The Greatest Story Ever Told--So Far

    Lawrence M. Krauss

    From awardwinning physicist, public intellectual, and the bestselling author of A Universe from Nothing Lawrence Krauss, comes “a masterful blend of history, modern physics, and co...

  • Richard Dawkins synopsis, comments

    Richard Dawkins

    Mike Hockney

    A book attacking the ideology of Richard Dawkins is invariably assumed to be a defence of religious faith. Nothing could be further from the truth in this case. This book equates f...

  • The Science of God synopsis, comments

    The Science of God

    Gerald L. Schroeder

    For the readers of The Language of God, another instant classic from "a sophisticated and original scholar" (Kirkus Reviews) that disputes the idea that science is contrary to reli...

  • Even Dawkins Has a God synopsis, comments

    Even Dawkins Has a God

    Neil Laing

    Richard Dawkinss The God Delusion is one of the most serious attacks on religion in recent times. A number of highly capable authors have countered it.Neils reply is different from...

  • Richard Dawkins, C.S. Lewis and the Meaning of Life synopsis, comments

    Richard Dawkins, C.S. Lewis and the Meaning of Life

    Alister Mcgrath

    In this pithy, entertaining guide to what really matters, Alister McGrath brings together Richard Dawkins and C.S. Lewis, two intriguing and wellknown writers, in 'conversation'.Th...

  • Between Ape and Human synopsis, comments

    Between Ape and Human

    Gregory Forth

    A remarkable investigation into the hominoids of Flores Island, their place on the evolutionary spectrumand whether or not they still survive.While doing fieldwork on the remote In...

  • The Human Instinct synopsis, comments

    The Human Instinct

    Kenneth R. Miller

    From one of America’s bestknown biologists, a revolutionary new way of thinking about evolution that shows “why, in light of our origins, humans are still special” (Edward J. Larso...

  • The Magic of Reality synopsis, comments

    The Magic of Reality

    Richard Dawkins

    Magic takes many forms. Supernatural magic is what our ancestors used in order to explain the world before they developed the scientific method. The ancient Egyptians explained the...

  • The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being synopsis, comments

    The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being

    Alice Roberts

    'From your brain to your fingertips, you emerge from her book entertained and with a deeper understanding of yourself' Richard Dawkins'A masterful account of why our bodies are the...

  • Richard Dawkins synopsis, comments

    Richard Dawkins

    Ransom Poythress

    Richard Dawkins (1941– ) Richard Dawkins, a leader in the New Atheism movement and bestselling author, is one of the foremost proponents of a genecentered approach to evolutionary ...

  • Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent synopsis, comments

    Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent

    Alexander von Humboldt

    One of the greatest nineteenthcentury scientistexplorers, Alexander von Humboldt traversed the tropical Spanish Americas between 1799 and 1804. By the time of his death in 1859, he...

  • The Frontiers of Knowledge synopsis, comments

    The Frontiers of Knowledge

    A. C. Grayling

    'Grayling brings satisfying order to daunting subjects' Steven PinkerIn very recent times humanity has learnt a vast amount about the universe, the past, and itself. But through ou...

  • The Greatest Show on Earth synopsis, comments

    The Greatest Show on Earth

    Richard Dawkins

    Richard Dawkins transformed our view of God in his blockbuster, The God Delusion, which sold millions of copies in English alone. He revolutionized the way we see natural selection...

  • Eyrbyggja Saga synopsis, comments

    Eyrbyggja Saga

    Hermann Palsson & Paul Edwards

    An Icelandic saga which mixes realism with wild gothic imagination and history with eerie tales of hauntings. It dramatizes a 13th century view of the past, from the pagan anarchy ...

  • The Lost Key synopsis, comments

    The Lost Key

    Robert Lomas

    Robert Lomas is the bestselling coauthor of The Hiram Key and other international bestsellers on Freemasonic mysteries. Many say he is the model for Dan Brown's hero, Robert Langdo...

  • Outgrowing God synopsis, comments

    Outgrowing God

    Richard Dawkins

    Should we believe in God? In this brisk introduction to modern atheism, one of the world’s greatest science writers tells us why we shouldn’t.Richard Dawkins was fifteen when he st...

  • On the Origin of Species synopsis, comments

    On the Origin of Species

    Charles Darwin & Natalie Ramm

    This exciting anniversary edition has a new introduction and scholarly references by William Bynum, and the cover design is by Damien Hirst. It replaces our existing 1968 edition. ...

  • The Voyage of the Beagle synopsis, comments

    The Voyage of the Beagle

    Charles Darwin, Janet Browne & Michael Neve

    When HMS Beagle sailed out of Devonport on 27 December 1831, Charles Darwin was twentytwo and setting off on the voyage of a lifetime. His journal, here reprinted in a shortened fo...

  • Entangled Life synopsis, comments

    Entangled Life

    Merlin Sheldrake

    NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER  A “brilliant [and] entrancing” (The Guardian) journey into the hidden lives of fungithe great connectors of the living worldand their astonishing an...

  • There Is a God synopsis, comments

    There Is a God

    Antony Flew & Roy Abraham Varghese

    In one of the biggest religion news stories of the new millennium, the Associated Press announced that Professor Antony Flew, the world's leading atheist, now believes in God. Fle...

  • The Wisdom of Wolves synopsis, comments

    The Wisdom of Wolves

    Elli H. Radinger

    'ENCHANTING' MAIL ON SUNDAY They care for their elderly, play with their kids, and always put family first. Can we all learn something from the wisdom of wolves? In this unforge...

  • Why We Lie synopsis, comments

    Why We Lie

    David Livingstone Smith

    Deceit, lying, and falsehoods lie at the very heart of our cultural heritage. Even the founding myth of the JudeoChristian tradition, the story of Adam and Eve, revolves around a l...

  • Mansfield Park synopsis, comments

    Mansfield Park

    Jane Austen

    'Full of the energies of discord sibling rivalry, greed, ambition, illicit sexual passion and vanity' Margaret DrabbleJane Austen's profound, ambiguous third novel is the story of...

  • The Sleepwalkers synopsis, comments

    The Sleepwalkers

    Arthur Koestler

    Arthur Koestler's extraordinary history of humanity's changing vision of the universeIn this masterly synthesis, Arthur Koestler cuts through the sterile distinction between 'scien...

  • The God Delusion synopsis, comments

    The God Delusion

    Richard Dawkins

    A preeminent scientistand the world's most prominent atheistasserts the irrationality of belief in God and the grievous harm religion has inflicted on society, from the Crusades to...

  • Religion and Magic in Ancient Egypt synopsis, comments

    Religion and Magic in Ancient Egypt

    Rosalie David

    The ancient Egyptians believed that the Nile their life source was a divine gift. Religion and magic permeated their civilization, and this book provides a unique insight into th...

  • Red Strangers synopsis, comments

    Red Strangers

    Elspeth Huxley

    Growing up in Kenya in the early twentieth century, the brothers Matu and Muthegi are raised according to customs that, they are told, have existed since the beginning of the world...

  • Science in the Soul synopsis, comments

    Science in the Soul

    Richard Dawkins

    NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The legendary biologist and bestselling author mounts a timely and passionate defense of science and clear thinking with this careerspanning collection o...

  • Proof of God synopsis, comments

    Proof of God

    Ptolemy Tompkins & Bernard Haisch

    A Seeker, a Scientist, and the Stunning Answer to the World’s Oldest Question Ptolemy Tompkins, collaborator on the New York Times bestselling Proof of Heaven and Proof of Angels, ...

  • The Magic of Reality synopsis, comments

    The Magic of Reality

    Richard Dawkins

    An elegant, textonly edition of the New York Times bestseller that’s been hailed as the definitive authority on…everything.Richard Dawkins, bestselling author and the world’s most ...

  • Trans synopsis, comments

    Trans

    Helen Joyce

    THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER and a Times, Spectator and Observer Book of the Year 2021‘In the first decade of this century, it was unthinkable that a gendercritical book could even...

  • Why Evolution Is True synopsis, comments

    Why Evolution Is True

    Jerry A. Coyne

    "Coyne's knowledge of evolutionary biology is prodigious, his deployment of it as masterful as his touch is light." Richard Dawkins In the current debate about creationism and in...

  • Magisteria synopsis, comments

    Magisteria

    Nicholas Spencer

    Most things you ‘know’ about science and religion are myths or halftruths that grew up in the last years of the nineteenth century and remain widespread today.‘A deeply researched ...

  • Civilization and Its Discontents synopsis, comments

    Civilization and Its Discontents

    Sigmund Freud & David McLintock

    In what remains one of his most seminal papers, Freud considers the incompatibility of civilisation and individual happiness, and the tensions between the claims of society and the...