Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist; reader in the Department
of Zoology at Oxford University; fellow of New College. He began his
research career in the 1960s as a research student with Nobel
Prize-winning ethologist Nico Tinbergen, and ever since then, his work
has largely been concerned with the evolution of behavior. Since 1976,
when his first book, The Selfish Gene, encapsulated both the substance
and the spirit of what is now called the socio-biological revolution, he
has become widely known, both for the originality of his ideas and for
the clarity and elegance with which he expounds them. A subsequent book,
The Extended Phenotype, and a number of television programs, have
extended the notion of the gene as the unit of selection, and have
applied it to biological examples as various as the relationship between
hosts and parasites and the evolution of cooperation. His following
book, The Blind Watchmaker, is widely read, widely quoted, and one of
the truly influential intellectual works of our time. He is also author
of River Out of Eden, The Greatest Show on Earth, and The God Delusion. |
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