Richard Dawkins coined the word meme in a 1976 biology book
Long before memes meant internet jokes, a young Oxford zoologist invented the term in The Selfish Gene, a book arguing that evolution is best seen from the gene's point of view. Richard Dawkins went on to become Oxford's first professor for the public understanding of science and one of the world's best-known atheists.
Dawkins was born Clinton Richard Dawkins in Nairobi in 1941, the son of a colonial agricultural officer, and moved to England at eight when his father returned to farm an Oxfordshire estate. His parents answered his questions in scientific terms. Raised Anglican, he gave up belief in his mid-teens, having decided that Darwinian evolution explained life's complexity far better than design. He studied zoology at Balliol College, Oxford, under the Nobel-winning animal behaviour pioneer Nikolaas Tinbergen, finishing a doctorate by 1966 on how animals make decisions.
After two years teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, where he joined protests against the Vietnam War, he returned to Oxford in 1970. His central scientific idea is that genes, not groups or species, are the main unit on which selection acts. He popularised W. D. Hamilton's explanation of how altruism can evolve among relatives and Robert Trivers's account of reciprocal favours. He considered the extended phenotype, the notion that a gene's effects can reach beyond the body into the environment and even into other organisms, his most important contribution.
Not everyone agrees. Critics argue the gene is better described as a unit of evolution than of selection, or that genes cannot act alone since they must cooperate to build a body. Supporters of higher-level selection, including Richard Lewontin and David Sloan Wilson, say phenomena such as altruism need more than gene-level thinking. The philosopher Mary Midgley called his approach reductionist and linked its popularity to the individualism of the 1980s. Dawkins, for his part, has attacked E. O. Wilson's reading of kin selection and James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis.
In 1995 software pioneer Charles Simonyi endowed an Oxford chair for public understanding of science with Dawkins named as its first holder; he kept it until 2008. His 2006 book The God Delusion made him a leading figure of the so-called New Atheism, alongside Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris, yet he has repeatedly described himself as a cultural Anglican. He announced his final speaking tour for autumn 2024.
Source: Richard Dawkins
