Richard Dawkins

Clinton Richard Dawkins (born 26 March 1941 ), known as Richard Dawkins, ethologist is a British evolutionary biologist and author. He is an Emeritus Fellow of New College, Oxford, and was Oxford University Professor of the Public Understanding of Science from 1995 to 2008 .

Dawkins rose to fame with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which popularized the gene-centered view of evolution and introduced the term meme. In 1982 he introduced an influential concept in evolutionary biology, presented in his book The Extended Phenotype, that the phenotypic effects of a gene are not necessarily limited to the body of an organism, but can spread widely in the environment, including the bodies. from other organisms.

Dawkins is an atheist and humanist, a vice-president of the British Humanist Association and a supporter of the Bright movement. He is well known for his criticism of creationism and intelligent design. In his 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker, he argued against the watchmaker analogy, an argument for the existence of a supernatural creator based on the complexity of living organisms. Instead, he described evolutionary processes as analogous to that of a blind watchmaker. Since then he has written several popular science books, and makes regular radio and television appearances, especially discussing these topics. In his 2006 book The God Delusion Dawkins argues that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that religious faith is an illusion, a fixed false belief. As of January 2010 the English language version has sold more than two million copies and has been translated into 31 languages.

Summary

[ disguise ]

• 1 Biography
  • 1 Personal life
• 2 Work
  • 1 Evolutionary biology
    • 1.1 Memes
  • 2 The criticism of creationism
  • 3 The defense of atheism
  • 4 Richard Dawkins Foundation
  • 5 Other fields
• 3 Awards and recognitions
• 4 Books
• 5 Documentaries
• 6 Other aspects
• 7 Sources

Biography

Dawkins was born in Nairobi, Kenya . His father, Clinton John Dawkins (1915-2010), is a civil servant, farming in the British colonial service, in Nyasaland (now Malawi). Dawkins has a younger sister. His father was called up to the King’s African Rifles during the Second World War, returning to England in 1949 , when he was eight years old. His father had inherited a country house, over Norton Park, which was converted into a commercial farm. His parents were interested in natural sciences, which answers Dawkins’ questions in scientific terms.

Dawkins describes his childhood as “a normal Anglican upbringing”. Although he began to have doubts about the existence of a god, when he was about nine years old, he was persuaded by the argument from design, an argument for the existence of a god or creator based on perceived evidence of end, purpose or design in nature, and embraced Christianity. [not in citation given] In his teens, he concluded that the theory of evolution was a good explanation for life’s complexity, and stopped believing in a god.

He attended Oundle, a Church of England school, from 1954 to 1959. He studied zoology at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was a student of Nobel Prize-winning ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen, graduating in 1962 . He continued as a research student under Tinbergen’s supervision, receiving his MA and D.Phil. degrees in 1966, and remained a research assistant for one year. Tinbergen was a pioneer in the study of animal behavior, especially in the areas of instinct, learning and choice. Dawkins’ research in this period involved animal models of decision making.

From 1967 to 1969 he was an assistant professor of zoology at the University of California , Berkeley . During this period, students and faculty at the University of California at Berkeley largely opposed the ongoing Vietnam War, and Dawkins became involved in anti-war demonstrations and activities. He returned to Oxford University in 1970, taking a position as a lecturer, and in 1990 , as 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 “would be expected to make important contributions to the public understanding of some scientific field”, and that its first starter must be Richard Dawkins.

Since 1970 he has been a member of New College. He has delivered a number of inaugural and other lectures, including the Henry Sidgwick Memorial Lecture (1989), first Erasmus Darwin Memorial Lecture (1990), Michael Faraday Lecture (1991), THHuxley Memorial Lecture (1992), Irvine Memorial Lecture (1997). ), Sheldon Doyle Lecture (1999), Tinbergen Lecture (2004) and Tanner Lectures (2003). In 1991 she gave the Royal Institution Christmas lectures for children. He has also served as an editor for several journals, and has acted as editorial advisor to the Encarta Encyclopedia and the Encyclopedia of Evolution. He is a senior editor of the Council for Secular Humanism’s Free Inquiry magazine, for which he also writes a column. He has been a member of the editorial board of Skeptic magazine since its founding.

He has sat on the judging panels for awards as diverse as the Royal Society Faraday Prize and the British Television Academy Awards, and has been president of the Biological Sciences section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2004 Balliol College, Oxford established the Dawkins Prize, awarded for “research excellence in the ecology and behavior 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 young people in which he warns them against believing in “anti-scientific” fairy tales.”

personal life

On 19 August 1967 , Dawkins married fellow ethologist Marian Seal in Annestown, County Waterford, Ireland; They divorced in 1984. Later that year, on 1 June, he married Eva Barham (19 August 1951 – 28 February 1999) in Oxford. They had one daughter, Juliet Emma Dawkins (born 1984, Oxford). Dawkins and Barham divorced; She died of cancer. In 1992 he married actress Lalla Ward in Kensington and Chelsea, London. Dawkins met her through her mutual friend Douglas Adams, who had worked with her on the BBC’s Doctor Who.

Job

evolutionary biology

Dawkins of the University of Texas at Austin, March 2008

In his scientific works, Dawkins is best known for his dissemination of the gene-centric view of evolution. This view is most clearly expressed in his books The Selfish Gene ( 1976 ), where he notes that “all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities”, and The Extended Phenotype ( 1982 ), in which he describes selection natural as “the process by which replicators spread to others.” In his role as an ethologist, interested in animal behavior and its relationship to natural selection, he defends the idea that the gene is the main unit of selection in evolution.

Dawkins has always been skeptical about non-adaptive processes in evolution (e.g. spandrels, described by Gould and Lewontin) and about selection at levels “above” the genes. He is particularly skeptical about the practical possibility or importance of group selection as a basis for understanding altruism. This behavior appears at first glance to be an evolutionary paradox, since it helps others expend valuable resources and decreases one’s fitness. Previously, many have interpreted this as an aspect of group selection: individuals were doing what was best for the survival of the population or species as a whole, and not specifically for themselves. The British evolutionary biologist WD Hamilton had used the gene-centric view to explain altruism in terms of inclusive fitness and kin selection – that individuals behave altruistically towards their close relatives, who share many of their own genes. , Robert. Trivers, thinking in terms of the gene-centrist model, developed the theory of reciprocal altruism, in which one organism provides a benefit to another with the expectation of reciprocity in the future. Dawkins popularized these ideas in The Selfish Gene, and developed them in his own work.

The scientist James Lovelock has also been very critical of the Gaia theory of independent philosophy.

Critics of Dawkins’ approach suggest that taking the gene as the unit of selection – of a single event in which an individual is successful or fails to reproduce – is misleading, but that the gene might be better described as a unit of selection. evolution – of the long-term changes in the allele frequencies of a population. In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins explains that he is using George C. Williams’ definition of the gene as “that which separates and recombines with appreciable frequency.” Another common objection is that genes cannot survive alone, but must cooperate to build an individual, and therefore cannot be an independent “unit.” In The Extended Phenotype, Dawkins suggests that because of genetic recombination and sexual reproduction, from each gene’s point of view genes all the others are part of the environment to which it is adapted.

Advocates for a higher level of selection, such as Richard Lewontin, David Sloan Wilson, and Elliot Sober suggest that there are many phenomena (such as altruism) that gene-based selection cannot satisfactorily explain. The philosopher Mary Midgley, with whom Dawkins clashed in printing The Selfish Gene, has criticized gene selection, memetics, and sociobiology as overly reductionist, and suggests that the popularity of Dawkins’ work is due to factors in the zeitgeist, such as the increasing individualism of the Thatcher/Reagan decades.

In a series of controversies over the mechanisms and interpretation of evolution (the so-called “Darwin War”), one faction was often named after Dawkins and its rival after the American paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, reflecting the pre the supremacy of each one as a disseminator of the pertinent ideas. In particular, Dawkins and Gould have been prominent commentators on the controversy over sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, with Dawkins and Gould’s approval generally being generally critical. A typical example of Dawkins’s position was his scathing review of Not in Our Genes by Steven Rose, Leon J. Kamin and Richard C. Lewontin. Two other thinkers on the subject often considered to be allies of Dawkins are Steven Pinker and Daniel Dennett; Dennett has promoted a gene-centered view of evolution and defended reductionism in biology.[51] Despite his academic disagreements, Dawkins and Gould did not have a hostile personal relationship, and Dawkins devoted a large portion of his 2003 book to the service of the devil. posthumously to Gould, who had died the previous year.

Dawkins’ book “The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution lays out the evidence for biological evolution. All of his previous works relating to evolution had assumed its truth, and did not explicitly provide proof in that sense. Dawkins considered this It represented a gap in his work, and he decided to write the book to coincide with Darwin’s bicentenary year.

meme

Dawkins coined the word meme (the behavioral equivalent of a gene) to describe how Darwinian principles could be extended to explain the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena. This has spawned the field of memetics. Dawkins memes refer to any cultural entity that an observer might consider a replicator of a certain idea or complex of ideas. We hypothesize that people could see many cultural entities, capable of reproducing themselves for example, usually through exposure to humans, who have evolved such efficient (although not perfect) photocopiers of information and behavior. Memes are not always copied perfectly, and in fact could be refined, combined or modified with the ideas of others, resulting in new memes, which may be more or less, efficient replicators than their predecessors, thus providing a framework for a cultural diversity hypothesis of evolution, analogous to the gene-based theory of biological evolution. Since he originally outlined the idea in his book The Selfish Gene, Dawkins has largely left the task of expanding it to other authors, such as Susan Blackmore.

Although Dawkins invented the specific term meme independently, he has not claimed that the idea itself was entirely novel, and there have been other expressions of similar ideas in the past. For example, John Laurent has pointed out that the term may have derived from the work of the little-known German biologist Richard Semon. In 1904, Semon published Die Mneme (which appeared in English in 1924 as The Mneme). This book discusses the cultural transmission of experiences, with ideas parallel to those of Dawkins. Laurent also found the term mneme used in Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Life of the White Ant (1926), and has highlighted similarities with Dawkins’ concept.

The criticism of creationism

Dawkins is a prominent critic of creationism (the religious belief that humanity, life, and the universe were created by a god, [59] without recourse to evolution). He has described the Young Earth creationist view that the Earth is only a few thousand years old as “an absurd, mind-contracting lie”, and his 1986 book, The Blind Watchmaker, contains a sustained critique of the argument. of design, an important creationist argument. In the book, Dawkins argued against the watchmaker analogy made famous by 18th-century English theologian William Paley in his book Natural Theology. Paley argued that, just as a clock is too complicated and too functional to have come into existence simply by accident, so must all living things, with their much greater complexity, be designed on purpose. Dawkins shares the general opinion of scientists that natural selection is sufficient to explain the apparent functionality and not random complexity of the biological world, and it can be said that the clockmaker’s role in nature, even as an automatic system, does not intelligent watchmaker, blind. Dawkins at the 34th annual Conference of American Atheists, 2008

In 1986, Dawkins participated in an Oxford Union debate, in which English biologist John Maynard Smith debated Young Earth creationist AE Wilder-Smith and Edgar Andrews, president of the Biblical Creation Society. In general, however, Dawkins has followed the advice of his late colleague Stephen Jay Gould and refused to engage in formal debates with creationists, because “what they seek is the oxygen of respectability”, and in doing so they are “given oxygen by the mere fact of participating with them in everything”. He suggests that creationists “don’t mind being beaten in an argument. What matters is that we give them recognition for taking the trouble to argue with them in public.”

In a December 2004 interview with American journalist Bill Moyers, Dawkins said that “among the things that science knows, evolution is as certain as anything we know.” When asked by Moyers about the use of the word theory, Dawkins states that “evolution has been observed. It has not been observed while it is happening.” He added that “it’s more like a detective coming in on a murder after the scene…the detective hasn’t seen the murder take place, of course. But what he sees is a huge clue…enormous amounts of circumstantial evidence. It may also be written in English words.”

Dawkins has ardently opposed the inclusion of intelligent design in science education, which he described as “not a scientific argument at all, but a religious one.” He has been referred to in the media as “Darwin’s Rottweiler”, a reference to English biologist TH Huxley, who was known as “Darwin’s Bulldog” for his advocacy of Charles Darwin’s evolutionary ideas. He has been a strong critic of the British Truth Science organisation, which promotes the teaching of creationism in public schools, and plans through his Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science to schools to subsidize the provision of books, DVDs and brochures for , in order to counter what he has described as an “educational scandal”.

The defense of atheism

Dawkins is an open atheist and a prominent critic of religion. In an interview with Thomas Bass for a book published in 1994 , he described himself as a “completely militant atheist.” In 1996, when asked whether he prefers to be known as a scientist or a militant atheist, he responded: “Bertrand Russell called himself the passionate skeptic. He’s aiming high, but I’ll aim for that.” Dawkins is an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society, a vice-president of the British Humanist Association (since 1996), a Distinguished Aid of the Humanist Society of Scotland, a member of the Secular Coalition for America’s advisory board, an Award Humanist of the International Academy of Humanism, and member of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. In 2003 he became a signatory of the Humanist Manifesto of Humanism and its Aspirations, published by the American Humanist Association. As a result of his advocacy of his atheism, Dawkins has sometimes been described as a vocal, militant rationalist, and as “the UK’s chief atheist”.

Dawkins believes that his own atheism is the logical extension of his understanding of evolution and that religion is incompatible with science. In his 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins wrote:

An atheist before Darwin might have said, following Hume: “I have no explanation for the only complex biological design that I know is that God is not a good explanation, so we must wait and I hope that someone comes up with a better one. “I can’t help the feeling that that position, although logically sound, would have left me feeling quite unsatisfied, and that while atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually satisfied atheist.

In his 1991 essay “Viruses of the Mind” (from which the term originated from suffering faith), he suggested that memetic theory could analyze and explain the phenomenon of religious belief and some of the common characteristics of the religions, such as the belief that punishment awaits non-believers. According to Dawkins, faith – belief that is not based on evidence – is one of the world’s great evils. He claims it to be analogous to the smallpox virus, although more difficult to eradicate. Dawkins is well known for his disdain for religious extremism, from Islamist terrorism to Christian fundamentalism; But he has also argued with liberal believers and religious scientists, from biologists Kenneth Miller and Francis Collins to theologians Alister McGrath and Richard Harries. Dawkins has stated that his opposition to religion is twofold, stating that it is both a source of conflict and a justification for belief without evidence. However, he described himself as a “cultural Christian”, and proposed the motto “Jesus Atheists”.

After September 11 , 2001 , when asked how the world may have changed, Dawkins responded:

Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs may lack all evidence but, we thought, if people needed comfort, where’s the harm? September 11th changed all that. Revealed faith is not harmless nonsense, it can be lethally dangerous nonsense. Dangerous because it gives people firm confidence in their own righteousness. Dangerous because it gives them the false courage to kill themselves, which automatically removes the normal barriers to killing others. Dangerous because it instills enmity in other people labeled solely because of a difference in inherited traditions. And dangerous because we have all acquired a strange respect that exclusively protects religion from normal criticism. Let’s stop being so damn respectful!

Dawkins has especially risen to prominence in current public debates about science and religion since the publication of his 2006 book The God Delusion, which has achieved greater sales worldwide than any of his other works to date. date. His success has been seen by many as indicative of a shift in the contemporary cultural zeitgeist, at the center of a recent rise in the popularity of atheist literature. The God Delusion was praised among others by the Nobel Prize winners Sir Harold Kroto and James D. Watson and by the psychologist Steven Pinker. In the book, Dawkins suggests that atheists should be proud, not apologetic, because atheism is evidence of a healthy, independent mind. He considers education and awareness as primary tools to oppose what he considers religious dogma and indoctrination. These tools include fighting certain stereotypes, and he has adopted the term brilliant as a way of associating positive connotations with those who possess a naturalistic view of the world. Dawkins notes that feminists have succeeded in awakening widespread shame in the routine use of “he” instead of “she.” Similarly, he suggests, a phrase like “Catholic child” or “Muslim child” can be regarded as simply as socially absurd as, say, “Marxist child”: children should not be classified based on the beliefs of their parents. ideological. According to Dawkins, there is no such thing as a Christian child or a Muslim, as children have an up-ability to make the decision to become a Christian or a Muslim, as they do to be a Marxist.

In January 2006 Dawkins presented a two-part television documentary The Root of All Evil?, confronting what he sees as the malignant influence of religion on society. The title itself is one that Dawkins did not like, considering that religion should not be considered the root of all evil. Critics have said that the program gave too much time to fringe and extremist figures, and that Dawkins’ confrontational style did not help his cause and exhibited similarities with the approaches of religious fundamentalists rather than with the approaches of the dispassionate and Analyzing “hard” science, Dawkins rejected those allegations, citing the number of moderate religious broadcasts in everyday media, providing an adequate balance for extremists in the programs. It should also be noted that someone who is considered an “extremist” in a religiously moderate country might well be considered “mainstream” in a religious conservative. Unreleased recordings of Dawkins’ conversations with Alister McGrath and Richard Harries, including material used in the broadcast version, have been made available online by the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science.

Dawkins’ work has been controversial, and a number of Christian thinkers have responded to it. For example, Oxford theologian Alister McGrath (author of Dawkins’s Delusion and Dawkins’ God) argues that Dawkins is ignorant of Christian theology, and therefore cannot intelligently engage religion and faith. In response, Dawkins asks “what do you have to read about leprechology before believing in goblins?”, and – in the paperback edition of The God Delusion – refers to the American biologist PZ Myers, who has satirized this line of argument as “Courtier’s Response” Dawkins had an extensive debate with McGrath at the 2007 Sunday Times Literary Festival.

Dawkins argues that “the existence of God is a scientific hypothesis like any other.” He disagrees with Stephen Jay Gould’s principle that there are no overlapping magisteria. In an interview with Time magazine, Dawkins said:

I think Gould’s compartmentalization was a purely political work to win religious people halfway to the field of science. But it is a very empty idea. There are plenty of places where religion is not kept off the scientific lawn. Any belief in miracles is flatly contradictory not only to the facts of science, but to the spirit of science.

The astrophysicist Martin Rees, who has described himself as a non-believer who identifies with Christianity from a cultural perspective, has suggested that Dawkins’ “attack on the dominant religion is futile.” As for Rees’ claim in his book Our Cosmic Habitat Since “these questions lie beyond science,” Dawkins asks “what expertise can theologians bring to deep cosmological questions that scientists cannot?” “On the other hand, Dawkins has written that “there is a big difference in the world between the belief that one is willing to defend by citing evidence and logic, and the belief that supported by nothing more than tradition, authority, or revelation.” As examples of “good scientists who are sincerely religious,” Dawkins names Arthur Peacocke, Russell Stannard, John Polkinghorne, and Francis Collins, but says that “I am perplexed… by their belief in the details of the Christian religion.” He has said that the publication of The God Delusion was “probably the culmination” of his campaign against religion.

In 2007 he founded the Dawkins Out Campaign to encourage atheists around the world to declare their position publicly and proudly. [117] Inspired by the gay rights movement, Dawkins hopes that atheists “identifying themselves as such, and thereby increasing public awareness of how many people hold these views, will reduce the negative view of atheism.” among the religious majority.

In September 2008, following a complaint filed by Islamic creationist Adnan Oktar, a court in Turkey blocked access to Dawkins’ website richarddawkins.net. The judicial decision was made for “insult to personality.” As of July 8, 2011, richarddawkins.net is no longer blocked in Türkiye. Dawkins with Ariane Sherine at the launch of London’s atheist bus campaign

In October 2008, Dawkins officially supported the UK’s first atheist advertising programme, the Atheist Bus Campaign. Created by Guardian journalist Ariane Sherine and managed by the British Humanist Association campaign aimed at raising funds to place atheist adverts on buses in the London area, and Dawkins pledged to match the amount raised by atheists, up to a maximum of £5,500. However, the campaign was an unprecedented success, raising over £100,000 in its first four days, and generating worldwide press coverage. The campaign, which began in January 2009, features adverts in the UK with the slogan: “No. God probably doesn’t exist. Stop worrying and enjoy life.” Dawkins said that “this campaign to put alternative slogans on London buses will make people think and thinking is anathema to religion.”

In 2010, Dawkins supported legal efforts to charge Pope Benedict XVI with crimes against humanity. Dawkins and fellow anti-religion activist Christopher Hitchens are believed to have explored the option of trying to have the Pope arrested under the same legal principle that saw Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet detained during a visit to Britain in 1998.

Dawkins has given support to the idea of ​​a “free-thinking” school which he calls the “think-for-yourself Academy”. The school would not “indoctrinate children in atheism, as well as in religion,” but would teach children to “ask for evidence, to be skeptical, critical, open-minded.”

On 15 September 2010 , Dawkins, along with 54 other public figures, signed an open letter published in The Guardian, stating their opposition to Pope Benedict XVI making a state visit to the United Kingdom.

Richard Dawkins Foundation

Richard Dawkins for Reason and Science

In 2006, Dawkins founded the nonprofit Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science (RDFRS). The foundation is in the development phase. It has been granted charitable status in the United Kingdom and the United States. RDFRS plans to fund research into the psychology of belief and religion, fund science education programs and materials, and raise awareness and support secular charities. The foundation also offers humanist, rationalist and scientific materials and information through its website.

Dawkins has said that the “trend toward theocratic thinking in the United States is a danger not only to the United States but to the entire world.” Connected to this concern, Dawkins invited Sean Faircloth to serve as the opening speaker on Dawkins’ 2011 US promotional tour. Faircloth is author of the book Attack of the Theocrats, How the Religious Right Hurts Us All and What We Can Do about. The Richard Dawkins Foundation (United States branch) later hired Faircloth, who has ten years of experience as a state legislator, as Director of Strategy and Policy.

Other fields

In his role as a professor for the public understanding of science, Dawkins has been a critic of alternative medicine and pseudoscience. His 1998 book Unweaving the Rainbow takes John Keats’ charge that, in explaining the rainbow, Isaac Newton had reduced the beauty of it, and argues for the opposite conclusion. It suggests that deep space, the billions of years of life evolution, and the microscopic workings of biology and heredity contain more beauty and wonder than “myths” and “pseudoscience.” Dawkins wrote the preface to John Diamond’s posthumous Snake Oil, a book dedicated to debunking alternative medicine, in which he claimed that alternative medicine is harmful, if only because it distracts the most successful patients from conventional treatments, and gave people false hope. Dawkins states that “there is no alternative medicine. There is only medicine that works and medicine that doesn’t work.”

Dawkins has expressed concern about the growth of the planet’s human population, and about the issue of overpopulation. In The Selfish Gene, he briefly mentions population growth, giving the example of Latin America, whose population, at the time the book was written, doubled every 40 years. He is critical of Roman Catholic attitudes to family planning and population control, stating that leaders who prohibit contraception and “express a preference for “natural” methods of population limitation”, will receive one of those methods in the way to die of hunger.

As an advocate of the Great Ape Project – a movement to extend certain moral and legal rights to all great apes – Dawkins contributed the article “The Gaps in the Mind” to the book Ape Great Project by Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer. In this essay, he criticizes the moral attitudes of contemporary society that are based on a “discontinuous, speciesist imperative.”

Dawkins also regularly comments in newspapers and weblogs on contemporary political issues. His views include opposition to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the British nuclear deterrent capability and the actions of US President George W. Bush as several articles were included in The Devil’s Chaplain, an anthology of writings on science, religion and politics. He is also a supporter of the Republic’s campaign to replace the British monarchy with a democratically elected president. Dawkins has described himself as a Labor voter in the 1970s and a voter for the Liberal Democrat Party since the party’s creation. In 2009 he spoke at the party conference in opposition to blasphemy laws, alternative medicine and religious schools. In the 2010 UK general election, Dawkins officially endorsed the Liberal Democrat Party, in support of its campaign for electoral reform and for its “refusal to pander to ‘faith'”.

In the 2007 TV documentary The Enemies of Reason, Dawkins discusses what he sees as the dangers of abandoning critical thinking and reasoning based on scientific evidence. He specifically states astrology, spiritualism, dowsing, alternative religions, alternative medicine and homeopathy. He also discusses how the Internet can be used to spread religious hatred and conspiracy theories with little attention to evidence-based reasoning.

Continuing a long collaboration with Channel 4, Dawkins participated in a five-part television series The Genius of Britain, along with fellow scientists Stephen Hawking, James Dyson, Paul Nurse, and Jim Al-Khalili. The five-episode series aired in June 2010. [150] The series focused on major British scientific achievements throughout history.

Dawkins presented a documentary titled More4 threatens School of Faith? in which he advocated “forces us to reconsider the consequences of faith education, which deceives parents…and doctrine, and divides children.”

In 1998, Dawkins expressed his gratitude for two books, famous for his criticism of postmodernism in US universities, in departments such as literary studies, anthropology and other cultural studies, the two books are Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and his Quarrels with Science (by Gross and Levitt) and Intellectual Impostures (by Sokal and Bricmont), both related to Sokal’s hoax affair. [153] On the same occasion Dawkins also criticized the University of Cambridge for granting philosopher Jacques Derrida an honorary doctorate.

In 2011, Dawkins joined the faculty at the New School of Humanities, a new private university in London established by AC Grayling, which is scheduled to open in September 2012.

Awards and honours

Dawkins was awarded a PhD in Science from the University of Oxford in 1989. He has received honorary doctorates in Science from the University of Huddersfield, the University of Westminster, the University of Durham, the University of Hull, the University of Antwerp, and the University of Oslo, and Honorary Doctorate from the University of Aberdeen, Open University, the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and the University of Valencia. [158] He also holds honorary doctorates of letters from the University of St Andrews and the Australian National University (HonLittD, 1996), and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1997 and the Royal Society in 2001. He is one of the trustees of the Oxford University Scientific Society.

In 1987, Dawkins received a Royal Society of Literature Award and the Los Angeles Times Literary Award for his book, The Blind Watchmaker. In the same year, he received a science. Technology Award for Best Science Documentary Television Program of the Year, for the BBC’s Horizon episode The Blind Watchmaker.

His other awards have included the Zoological Society of London Silver Medal (1989), Finlay Innovation Prize (1990), the Michael Faraday Prize (1990), the Nakayama Prize (1994), American Humanist Association Humanist of the Year Award (1996), the fifth International Cosmos Prize (1997), the Kistler Prize (2001), the Medal of the Presidency of the Italian Republic (2001), the Kelvin Bicentenary Medal of the Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow (2002) and the Nierenberg Prize for Science in the Public Interest (2009).

Dawkins topped Perspective magazine’s 2004 list of the 100 British public intellectuals, as decided by readers, who received twice as many votes as second place. [160] [161] He has been shortlisted as candidates in his 2008 poll. In 2005, the Hamburg-based Alfred Toepfer Foundation awarded him the Shakespeare Prize in recognition of his “concise and accessible presentation of scientific knowledge.” He won the Lewis Thomas Prize for Science Writing for 2006 and the Galaxy British Book Author of the Year Awards for 2007. In the same year, he was listed by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2007, and He was ranked 20th on The Daily Telegraph’s 2007 list of the 100 greatest living geniuses. He was awarded the Deschner Prize, named after German anti-clerical author Karlheinz Deschner.

Since 2003, the International Alliance of Atheists has given an award during its annual conference, honoring a prominent atheist whose work has done the most to raise public awareness about atheism during that year. It is known as the Richard Dawkins Award, in honor of Dawkins’ own work.

In February 2010 he was named to the Freedom of Religion Foundation’s Honorary Council of Distinguished Achievers.