Born in Nairobi, Richard Dawkins both was educated at and works for the University of Oxford. Since 1995, he has held the Charles Simonyi Professorship of Public Understanding of Science. He is known for his popularist works on evolution theory, and for his outspoken opposition to religion, particularly to Christianity.

Dawkins has worked primarily on making evolution theory comprehensible to laypersons. Among his contributions to his field is the rise of memetics; indeed, Dawkins coined the term meme in The Selfish Gene. Memetics applies evolutionary principles not to biological organisms but rather to ideas; ideas, like animals, can mutate, and replicate themselves, and compete for survival, and so ideas, like animals, can evolve. If this is correct, then our intellectual climate will be determined not simply by the evidence yielded by ongoing enquiry, but by which ideas win and lose the fight for survival; the ideas that are best equipped for this fight will survive, irrespective of whether they are true.

Dawkins applies this insight to religion, offering a memetic critique of Christianity: religious belief, particularly Christian belief, is widespread because it stresses faith over reason, making it resistant to refutation, and threatens hell, giving it deep psychological impact and causing it to replicate itself. The success of Christianity, on this view, has nothing to do with truth; it is all about the ability to survive and reproduce.

In a subsequent work, Dawkins takes on the argument from design. The Blind Watchmaker, provocatively titled after William Paley’s analogical design argument which likens the universe to a watch, seeks to provide a naturalistic explanation of the appearance of design in the universe. There Dawkins sets out to explain how the process of natural selection, acting over time, can successfully explain our origins. There is no need, argues Dawkins, to postulate a divine Creator; evolution can explain all.