Dawkins, Richard

   b. 1941, Nairobi (Kenya)

   Biologist and writer

   Dawkins is a biologist who has written on the scientific, religious and social implications of Darwinian evolution. He adopts an unconventional perspective in which genes are the fundamental targets of natural selection which may individually survive, mutate or become lost from the pool of genes depending upon their ability to make a successful organism. In The Selfish Gene, he considers social behaviour from this point of view, while in The Blind Watchmaker he details arguments that the evolution of complex living organisms requires only the cumulative selection (by the prevailing environment) of useful errors, or mutations, in genes and the laws of chemistry, but not the intervention of a deity. His lucid and compelling style has made evolution interesting to a wide audience.

   See also: Hawking, Stephen; neo-Darwinism; science

   PETE SHETERLINE