[13][3] He is the son of Jean Mary Vyvyan (née Ladner; 1916–2019)[14][15] and Clinton John Dawkins (1915–2010), an agricultural civil servant in the British Colonial Service in Nyasaland (present-day Malawi), of an Oxfordshire landed gentry family.

[23] He embraced Christianity until halfway through his teenage years, at which point he concluded that the theory of evolution alone was a better explanation for life's complexity, and ceased believing in a god.

During this period, the students and faculty at UC Berkeley were largely opposed to the ongoing Vietnam War, and Dawkins became involved in the anti-war demonstrations and activities.

In 2004, Balliol College, Oxford, instituted the Dawkins Prize, awarded for "outstanding research into the ecology and behaviour of animals whose welfare and survival may be endangered by human activities".

[56] Altruism appears at first to be an evolutionary paradox, since helping others costs precious resources and decreases one's own chances for survival, or "fitness".

British evolutionary biologist W. D. Hamilton used gene-frequency analysis in his inclusive fitness theory to show how hereditary altruistic traits can evolve if there is sufficient genetic similarity between actors and recipients of such altruism, including close relatives.

[59] In June 2012, Dawkins was highly critical of fellow biologist E. O. Wilson's 2012 book The Social Conquest of Earth as misunderstanding Hamilton's theory of kin selection.

[62][63][64] Critics of Dawkins's biological approach suggest that taking the gene as the unit of selection (a single event in which an individual either succeeds or fails to reproduce) is misleading.

He hypothesised that people could view many cultural entities as capable of such replication, generally through communication and contact with humans, who have evolved as efficient (although not perfect) copiers of information and behaviour.

[84] Semon regarded "mneme" as the collective set of neural memory traces (conscious or subconscious) that were inherited, although such view would be considered as Lamarckian by modern biologists.

[85] Nonetheless, James Gleick describes Dawkins's concept of the meme as "his most famous memorable invention, far more influential than his selfish genes or his later proselytising against religiosity".

[90] Dawkins disagrees with Stephen Jay Gould's principle of nonoverlapping magisteria (NOMA)[91] and suggests that the existence of God should be treated as a scientific hypothesis like any other.

[95][96] In May 2014, at the Hay Festival in Wales, Dawkins explained that while he does not believe in the supernatural elements of the Christian faith, he still has nostalgia for the ceremonial side of religion.

[109] In his February 2002 TED talk entitled "Militant atheism", Dawkins urged all atheists to openly state their position and to fight the incursion of the church into politics and science.

[39][112][113] These tools include the fight against certain stereotypes, and he has adopted the term bright as a way of associating positive public connotations with those who possess a naturalistic worldview.

[113] While some critics, such as writer Christopher Hitchens, psychologist Steven Pinker and Nobel laureates Sir Harold Kroto, James D. Watson, and Steven Weinberg have defended Dawkins's stance on religion and praised his work,[117] others, including Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist Peter Higgs, astrophysicist Martin Rees, philosopher of science Michael Ruse, literary critic Terry Eagleton, philosopher Roger Scruton, academic and social critic Camille Paglia, atheist philosopher Daniel Came and theologian Alister McGrath,[124] have criticised Dawkins on various grounds, including the assertion that his work simply serves as an atheist counterpart to religious fundamentalism rather than a productive critique of it, and that he has fundamentally misapprehended the foundations of the theological positions he claims to refute.

[130] In response to his critics, Dawkins maintains that theologians are no better than scientists in addressing deep cosmological questions and that he is not a fundamentalist, as he is willing to change his mind in the face of new evidence.

"[134] In 2016, Dawkins' invitation to speak at the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism was withdrawn over his sharing of what was characterized as a "highly offensive video" satirically showing cartoon feminist and Islamist characters singing about the things they hold in common.

[139] In 1986, Dawkins and biologist John Maynard Smith participated in an Oxford Union debate against A. E. Wilder-Smith (a Young Earth creationist) and Edgar Andrews (president of the Biblical Creation Society).

He has been a strong critic of the British organisation Truth in Science, which promotes the teaching of creationism in state schools, and whose work Dawkins has described as an "educational scandal".

He plans to subsidise schools through the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science with the delivery of books, DVDs, and pamphlets that counteract their work.

[159] Dawkins also regularly comments in newspapers and blogs on contemporary political questions and is a frequent contributor to the online science and culture digest 3 Quarks Daily.

[160] His opinions include opposition to the 2003 invasion of Iraq,[161] the British nuclear deterrent, the actions of then-US President George W. Bush,[162] and the ethics of designer babies.

In the UK general election of 2010, Dawkins officially endorsed the Liberal Democrats, in support of their campaign for electoral reform and for their "refusal to pander to 'faith'".

[173] Dawkins has been accused by writers such as Amanda Marcotte, Caitlin Dickson, and Adam Lee of misogyny, criticizing those who speak about sexual harassment and abuse while ignoring sexism within the New Atheist movement.

As an example he quotes the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari: "We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis."

He suggests that deep space, the billions of years of life's evolution, and the microscopic workings of biology and heredity contain more beauty and wonder than do "myths" and "pseudoscience".

[182] Continuing a long-standing partnership with Channel 4, Dawkins participated in a five-part television series, Genius of Britain, along with fellow scientists Stephen Hawking, James Dyson, Paul Nurse, and Jim Al-Khalili.

[195] In a poll held by Prospect in 2013, Dawkins was voted the world's top thinker based on 65 names chosen by a largely US and UK-based expert panel.

[202] In 2012, a Sri Lankan team of ichthyologists headed by Rohan Pethiyagoda named a new genus of freshwater fish Dawkinsia in Dawkins's honor.