Richard Dawkins is the author of the bestselling science books The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, River Out of Eden, Climbing Mount Improbable, Unweaving the Rainbow, The Ancestor’s Tale and The God Delusion. He is a Fellow of both the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Literature, has received numerous awards, and was the first holder of the Charles Simonyi Chair in the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University from 1995 until 2008. An atheist and scientific rationalist, he is famous for his advocacy of natural selection. The God Delusion has sold well over 1.5 million copies and has been translated into 31 languages. Recently, his television programme 'The Genius of Charles Darwin' won 'Best Documentary Series' at the British Broadcast Awards in 2009. He lives in Oxford and will be joining us via satellite.
BOOKS
The Selfish Gene
Professor Dawkins articulates a gene's eye view of evolution - a view giving centre stage to these persistent units of information, and in which organisms can be seen as vehicles for their replication. This imaginative, powerful, and stylistically brilliant work not only brought the insights of Neo-Darwinism to a wide audience, but galvanized the biology community, generating much debate and stimulating whole new areas of research.
'Dawkins's first book, The Selfish Gene, was a smash hit... Best of all, Dawkins laid out this biology - some of it truly subtle - in stunningly lucid prose. (It is, in my view, the best work of popular science ever written.)' - H. Allen Orr, New York Review of Books
'The Selfish Gene is a classic.' - Robin McKie, The Observer
'A genuine cultural landmark of our time.' - The Independent
'Review from previous edition The sort of popular science writing that makes the reader feel like a genius.' - New York Times
The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design
One of the most famous arguments of the creationist theory of the universe is that of the eighteenth-century theologian William Paley: Just as a watch is too complicated and too functional to have sprung into existence by accident, so too must all living things, with their far greater complexity, be purposefully designed. But as Richard Dawkins demonstrates in this brilliant and eloquent riposte to the Argument from Design, the analogy is false. Natural selection—the unconscious, automatic, blind yet essentially nonrandom process that Darwin discovered—has no purpose in mind. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature at all, it is the blind watchmaker. Patiently and lucidly, Dawkins identifies those aspects of the theory of evolution that people find hard to believe and removes the barriers to credibility one by one.
Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Royal Society of Literature's Heinemann Prize, The Blind Watchmaker is "beautifully and superbly written. . . . It is one of the best science books—one of the best any books—I have ever read."—Lee Dembart, Los Angeles Times.
Climbing Mount Improbable
The human eye is so complex and works so precisely that surely, one might believe, its current shape and function must be the product of design. How could such an intricate object have come about by chance? Tackling this subject—in writing that the New York Times called "a masterpiece"—Richard Dawkins builds a carefully reasoned and lovingly illustrated argument for evolutionary adaptation as the mechanism for life on earth. The metaphor of Mount Improbable represents the combination of perfection and improbability that is epitomized in the seemingly "designed" complexity of living things. Dawkins skillfully guides the reader on a breathtaking journey through the mountain's passes and up its many peaks to demonstrate that following the improbable path to perfection takes time. Evocative illustrations accompany Dawkins's eloquent descriptions of extraordinary adaptations such as the teeming populations of figs, the intricate silken world of spiders, and the evolution of wings on the bodies of flightless animals. And through it all runs the thread of DNA, the molecule of life, responsible for its own destiny on an unending pilgrimage through time. Climbing Mount Improbable is a book of great impact and skill, written by the most prominent Darwinian of our age.
Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder
Did Newton "unweave the rainbow" by reducing it to its prismatic colors, as Keats contended? Did he, in other words, diminish beauty? Far from it, says acclaimed scientist Richard Dawkins; Newton's unweaving is the key to much of modern astronomy and to the breathtaking poetry of modern cosmology. Mysteries don't lose their poetry because they are solved: the solution often is more beautiful than the puzzle, uncovering deeper mysteries. With the wit, insight, and spellbinding prose that have made him a best-selling author, Dawkins takes up the most important and compelling topics in modern science, from astronomy and genetics to language and virtual reality, combining them in a landmark statement of the human appetite for wonder. This is the book Richard Dawkins was meant to write: a brilliant assessment of what science is (and isn't), a tribute to science not because it is useful but because it is uplifting.
The God Delusion
A preeminent scientist -- and the world's most prominent atheist -- asserts the irrationality of belief in God and the grievous harm religion has inflicted on society, from the Crusades to 9/11.
With rigor and wit, Dawkins examines God in all his forms, from the sex-obsessed tyrant of the Old Testament to the more benign (but still illogical) Celestial Watchmaker favored by some Enlightenment thinkers. He eviscerates the major arguments for religion and demonstrates the supreme improbability of a supreme being. He shows how religion fuels war, foments bigotry, and abuses children, buttressing his points with historical and contemporary evidence. The God Delusion makes a compelling case that belief in God is not just wrong but potentially deadly. It also offers exhilarating insight into the advantages of atheism to the individual and society, not the least of which is a clearer, truer appreciation of the universe's wonders than any faith could ever muster.
"At last, one of the best nonfiction writers alive today has assembled his thoughts on religion into a characteristically elegant book. If you think that science is just another religion, that religion is about our higher values, or that scientists are just as dogmatic as believers, then read this book, and see if you can counter Dawkins's arguments. They are passionately stated and poetically expressed, but are rooted in reason and evidence." — Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor, Harvard University, and author of The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, and The Blank Slate
"Dawkins gives human sympathies and emotions their proper value, which is one of the things that lends his criticisms of religion such force. Many religious leaders today are men who, it's obvious to anyone but their deranged followers, are willing to sanction vicious cruelty in the service of their faith. Dawkins hits them with all the power that reason can wield, demolishing their preposterous attempts to prove the existence of God, or their presumptuous claims that religion is the only basis of morality, or that their holy books are literally true." — Philip Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials trilogy
"This is a brave and important book. Is it too much to hope that it will dump religious bigotry in the dustbin of history, where it belongs?" — Desmond Morris, author of The Naked Ape and The Human Animal
Richard Dawkins - "What if you're wrong?"
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