Clinton Richard Dawkins FRS FRSL (born 26 March 1941) is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist, and writer. He is an emeritus adolescent of New College, Oxford, and was the University of Oxford's Professor for Accessible Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008.
Dawkins is a acclaimed atheist, a angel of the British Humanist Association, and a adherent of the Brights movement,and is able-bodied accepted for his criticism of creationism and able design. In his 1986 book The Dark Watchmaker, he argues adjoin the watchmaker analogy, an altercation for the actuality of a abnormal architect based aloft the complication of active organisms. Instead, he describes evolutionary processes as akin to a dark watchmaker. Dawkins aboriginal came to bulge with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which popularised the gene-centred appearance of change and alien the appellation meme. In 1982, he alien into evolutionary analysis the affecting abstraction that the phenotypic furnishings of a gene are not necessarily bound to an organism's body, but can amplitude far into the environment, including the bodies of added organisms. This abstraction is presented in his book The Extended Phenotype.

Background

Dawkins was built-in in Nairobi, British Kenya, on 26 March 1941. He is the son of Jean Mary Vyvyan (née Ladner) and Clinton John Dawkins (1915–2010), who was an agronomical civilian abettor in the British Colonial Service in Nyasaland (now Malawi). Dawkins considers himself English and lives in Oxford, England.
Dawkins has a adolescent sister. His ancestor was alleged up into the King's African Rifles during the Second World War and alternate to England in 1949, if Dawkins was eight. His ancestor had affiliated a country estate, Over Norton Park in Oxfordshire, which he farmed commercially. Both his parents were absorbed in accustomed sciences; they answered Dawkins's questions in accurate terms.
Dawkins describes his adolescence as "a accustomed Anglican upbringing".He was a Christian until center through his boyish years, at which point he assured that the approach of change was a bigger account for life's complexity, and accomplished assertive in a god. Dawkins states: "the capital balance acumen why I was religious was from getting so afflicted with the complication of activity and activity that it had to accept a designer, and I anticipate it was if I realised that Darwinism was a far above account that pulled the rug out from beneath the altercation of design. And that larboard me with nothing."

Education

Dawkins abounding Oundle Academy in Northamptonshire, an English accessible academy with a audible Church of England flavour, from 1954 to 1959, area he was in Laundimer house. He advised zoology at Balliol College, Oxford, admission in 1962; while there, he was accomplished by Nobel Prize-winning ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen. He connected as a analysis apprentice beneath Tinbergen's supervision, accepting his MA and DPhil degrees by 1966, and remained a analysis abettor for addition year. Tinbergen was a avant-garde in the abstraction of beastly behaviour, decidedly in the areas of instinct, acquirements and choice; Dawkins's analysis in this aeon anxious models of beastly decision-making.