Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist and popular science author that is best known for emphasizing the gene as the being at the core of evolution. He has also generated much controversy with his unparalleled advocacy of atheism. Dawkins was born in Nairobi, Kenya in 1941 and spent much of his early childhood in Kenya, where his father was working during the Second World War. In 1949 the family relocated back to England and in 1959 Richard enrolled as a student at the University of Oxford, Balliol College where he got a bachelors in Zoology in 1962. He went on to get his Masters and Doctorate from Oxford, learning under Nikolaas Tinbergen the ethologist. He was an assistant for Tinbergen for a while until he relocated to the United States, where he became a professor of zoology at the University of California, Berkeley between 1967 and 1969. In 1970 he went back to Oxford and taught Zoology for several years. In 1995, Oxford appointed Dawkins to the position of Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science. Over the years, he has won several writing prestigious writing and academic awards and made regular Internet, radio, and television appearances where he discusses his opinions, ideas, his atheism and his books as a public intellectual.