Richard Dawkins
In 2005, Richard Dawkins received the Shakespeare Prize, an award that marked a notable moment in a career built across science and public writing. The recognition arrived for a figure who had spent decades working at the intersection of research and communication aimed at general readers.
Born on 26 March 1941 in Nairobi, Dawkins is a British citizen whose work spans evolutionary biology, zoology, and authorship. He was educated at the University of Oxford, at Balliol College, and the institution has remained a constant in his professional life — he holds the position of emeritus fellow at New College, Oxford. His book The Selfish Gene established him as an author capable of addressing scientific subject matter in English prose for audiences well beyond the specialist. That capacity for accessible scientific writing has run alongside his identity as a science communicator throughout his career.
The awards Dawkins has received reflect the range of his output. The Shakespeare Prize came in 2005, and the following year he was awarded the Lewis Thomas Prize. That two prizes arrived in consecutive years points to a consistency in how his written work has been received. His formal connection to Oxford, as emeritus fellow of New College, continues to anchor him to the university where much of his career developed, and The Selfish Gene remains the work most closely associated with his name as an author.
Quotes by Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins's insights on:
Brains function on a need-to-know basis, and the need-to-know in order to survive on the African plains as hunter-gatherers. It's pure bonus if we manage to understand a bit about relativity and quantum theory as well. I think it's a tremendous privilege that we can understand as much as we can.
An Internet meme is a hijacking of the original idea. Instead of mutating by random change and spreading by a form of Darwinian selection, Internet memes are altered deliberately by human creativity. There is no attempt at accuracy of copying, as with genes - and as with memes in their original version
The selfish gene. They are in you and in me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence... they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.
It doesn't hurt my feelings when I get vilified by fundamentalist. I've actually made comedy out of it. I've made light of that.
The idea of an afterlife where you can be reunited with loved ones can be immensely consoling – though not to me.
If it is solely an evolutionary convenience, there is really no such thing as good or evil.
If you listen to two people who are arguing about something, and they each of them have passionate faith that they're right, but they believe different things—they belong to different religions, different faiths, there is nothing they can do to settle their disagreement short of shooting each other, which is what they very often actually do.
Biology is the study of the complex things in the Universe. Physics is the study of the simple ones.
There is another kind of altruism that seems to go beyond that, a kind of super-altruism, which humans appear to have. And I think that does need a Darwinian explanation.
DNAÂ is ROM. It can be read millions of times over, but only written to once - when it is first assembled the birth of the cell in which it resides.