Interviewee: Richard Dawkins
Interviewer: Evan Solomon
Date: December 17, 2007

Thousands have happily lost their religion due to one Richard Dawkins. A materialist for better or worse, the Oxford-educated zoologist put a human face on atheism with his bestselling books.

Richard Dawkins has authored many books, several of which have courted for their incendiary ramifications on religion. Among others, he penned The Greatest Show On Earth: The Evidence For Evolution (2009), The God Delusion (2006), The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life (2005), A Devil’s Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love (2004), Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder (2000), The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene (1999), The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design (1996), Climbing Mount Improbable (1997), and River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (1996).

Richard Dawkins released his first publication, The Selfish Gene, in 1976. Borrowing lavishly from Charles Darwin, he theorized that genes mutate with the planet’s technological advances.

Biologists around the world have since placed Richard Dawkins among the most famous people in Darwinism. For his works, Richard Dawkins has been the recipient of many accolades on both sides of the Atlantic.

Born in Nairobi in 1941, Richard Dawkins enrolled in Oxford University in 1959 and finished his undergraduate degree in 1962. He secured his doctorate in the same university, under the tutelage of Niko Tinbergen, the famous ethnologist.

In 1967, Richard moved to the US to become a zoology professor at the University of California – Berkeley, serving so until 1969. He returned to Britain in 1970 to lecture at Oxford and has remained in the country since then.

In 1995, Richard Dawkins became Oxford’s first ever Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science. Two years later, he was voted a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Furthermore, he was named to lecture at the Glasgow Centenary Gifford Lectures in 1988.

Richard Dawkins serves as vice president of the British Humanist Association.