Richard Dawkins is one of the most effective science popularizers of all time, awarded recognition by both scientific and literary society. His best-selling popular science books, like The Selfish Gene (1976) and The Blind Watchmaker (1986), have created vocabulary, examples, and arguments widely used in discourse about evolution. Passionately convinced that science rules out the supernatural, Dawkins has become an increasingly aggressive and outspoken for of religion, using science to discredit religious beliefs. In this later capacity he has become a strange bedfellow of those, like Phillip Johnson, who would convince religious people they must not accept evolution. In fact, there are probably more people who know about Dawkins from his critics than from his own work.
Clinton Richard Dawkins was born in Nairobi (Kenya) on March 26, 1941. Educated at Oxford University, he remained there for his doctorate, working with the Nobel Prize-winning ethologist Niko Tinbergen. From 1967 to 1969 he was assistant professor of zoology at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1970 Dawkins became a lecturer and reader in zoology at Oxford University; he has been a Fellow of New College ever since. In 1995 he became the first Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, an endowed chair created especially for him. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2001. Readers polls place Dawkins among the top public British intellectuals.
In 1976 Richard Dawkins exploded into view with the publication of his first and most famous book, The Selfish Gene, which became an international bestseller. Three decades later, his name and ideas remain closely associated with this book, partly due to its catchy title. How can a gene, a piece of DNA, be selfish? Provocative metaphors like this contribute to Dawkins’s success, and in fact, no one has done more to shape the vocabulary of their own field than Dawkins.
The Selfish Gene introduces a simple idea: Living organisms behave as if they have aims and goals. In the end, however, the apparent purposefulness derives from the genes of the organisms and their efforts to survive through replication. Living organisms are vehicles that secure the continuity of the genes that give them structure, pattern, and instinct. Individuals are short-term homes for long-lived genes; individuals are born, live, and die, but their genes are copied and passed through other individuals from generation to generation. They survive for thousands, even millions, of years. Genes are the enduring heart of a vanishing reality that passes away while they live on. We all have genes from someone who died centuries ago, and we will pass these genes into the future.
Natural selection, as Darwin argued, is the driving force of evolution, and genes are the basic unit of selection. Though the visible competitors in the struggle for existence are individual organisms, they are just temporary. The real protagonists are the genes. Successful genes are those that have built up selfish, ruthless parasites manipulating their host organisms for their own survival. This is Dawkins’s compelling view.
Like all grand ideas in science, the concept of The Selfish Gene did not come out of the blue. It was advanced to solve the problem of exactly how we should understand evolution. From a Darwinian perspective, evolution results from two synergistic factors: changes in the hereditary material of an organism, and natural selection of the organisms better adapted to their environment. Viewing the individual organisms in this struggle as the competitors is a natural, almost default, way to think about evolution. But it does not take much imagination to realize that there are other perspectives on the basic competitive unit being selected by nature. Groups of individuals that share common characteristic, for example, are also good candidates. Some biologists, in fact, insist that evolution works at the level of individuals, while others point to groups of individuals, or even species, as the unit of natural selection. Dawkins makes the extraordinary claim that evolution works on genes – not individuals, not groups, not species, but genes. After all, he argues with great eloquence, evolution is all about surviving, reproducing, and leaving descendants, and this depends mainly on genes.
Evolution, as Darwin understood it, differs from this interpretation by Dawkins, but then Darwin didn’t know anything about genes. Dawkins, however, claims that his view is really profoundly Darwinian, a natural reframing of classic argument in the light of new data. In fact, Dawkins is often seen as a fully orthodox Darwinian, vigorously defending an entrenched position that his critics sometimes describe as fundamentalist.
Darwin’s genius, of course, was not the idea of evolution per se, which had been floating about in a variety of forms from the beginning of the nineteenth century. For example, Darwin’s grandfather, the eccentric Erasmus Darwin, had proposed an evolution of sorts decades earlier. The novelty of Darwin’s On the Origins of Species by Means of Natural Selection derived from its articulation of the mechanism of evolution: natural selection. Nature selects organisms better adapted in the struggle to survive just as farmers select breeding animals with certain characteristics to improve their offspring. The choice of the farmer, of course, is conscious and deliberate and has a goal in mind, while the “choice” of nature is blind and unconscious, but the results are similar: Organisms better adapted to their environment are produced, and eventually the historical trajectory of accumulating change can lead to the appearance of new species.
Evolutionary theory in its modern form retains the overall conceptual structure outlined by Darwin, with the addition of insights from genetics. That Darwin could propose his theory in total ignorance of genetics was remarkable, confirmed his basic intuitions. The development of genetics in the twentieth century, jointly with work on populations and statistics, led to the so-called modern synthesis, or neo-Darwinism.
Excerpt from Oracles of Science
