Hawkins, Richard

Richard Hawkins – Biography

Born March 26, 1941, in Nairobi, Kenya is a bestselling atheist popularizer of Darwinian evolutionary theory and its counter-religious implications. His scientific field is ethology, the study of animal behavior.

The most readily recognizable figure in the Darwin debate, Dawkins retired in 2008 as Professor for Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, a position he held from 1995, by which time he had effectively discontinued his career as a publishing research scientist. His curriculum vitae gives no record of original, peer-reviewed scientific publications since 1994. His best known books include The Selfish Gene (1976), The Extended Phenotype (1982), The Blind Watchmaker (1986), and The God Delusion (2006). The last of these, widely influential and controversial, has sold 1.5 million copies in its English-language edition and been translated into 31 other languages.