Richard Dawkins

His first marriage was to fellow ethologist Marian Stamp in 1967. The couple divorced in 1984.

Shortly after his divorce he married Eve Barham and had a daughter with her. This marriage too ended in divorce.

He tied the knot for the third time with Lalla Ward in 1992. Lalla is an actress who he had met through a common friend.

He was born on 26 March 1941 in Nairobi, Kenya as the son of Jean Mary Vyvyan and Clinton John Dawkins. His father was an agricultural civil servant in the British Colonial Service in Kenya and thus he spent his early life in the country’s wilderness, observing the different types of animals and their behavior. He has one younger sister.

The family went to England in 1949 when Dawkins was eight. He was raised as a Christian though he stopped believing in religion during his teenage years. An intelligent and curious boy, he realized that the theory of evolution offered much better answers to life’s puzzles than did religion.

He went to Oundle School in Northamptonshire from 1954 to 1959. After that he went to Balliol College, Oxford where he studied zoology and graduated in 1962. While there he studied under the eminent ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen as a research student and received his D.Phil degree by 1966.

He was appointed as an assistant professor of zoology at the University of California, Berkeley in 1967 and held this position till 1969. While there he became heavily involved in the anti-war demonstrations and activities.

He became a lecturer at the University of Oxford in 1970. A few years later he published his book, ‘The Selfish Gene’ (1976), a book on evolution which builds upon the principal theory of George C. Williams’ first book ‘Adaptation and Natural Selection’.

In the book ‘The Selfish Gene’ he argued that natural selection takes place at the genetic level rather than the species or individual level as was generally assumed. He stated that genes use the bodies of living organisms to further their own survival.

In 1982 he released his book ‘The Extended Phenotype’ in which he describes the biological concept of the same name. He explained that phenotypes should not be limited to biological processes but also extended to include all effects that a gene has on its environment.

In 1990 he assumed the post of a reader in zoology at the University of Oxford. He was appointed Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford in 1995—a position that had been endowed by Charles Simonyi with the specific request that Richard Dawkins be its first holder. |

He won a Royal Society of Literature award and a Los Angeles Times Literary Prize for his book ‘The Blind Watchmaker’ in 1987.

In 1989, he was honored with the Zoological Society of London's Silver Medal and the next year he received the Finlay Innovation Award and the Michael Faraday Award.

The Hamburg-based Alfred Toepfer Foundation awarded him with Shakespeare Prize in recognition of his "concise and accessible presentation of scientific knowledge" in 2005.

In 2006, he won the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science and in 2007, the Galaxy British Book Awards’ Author of the Year Award.

In 2010, Dawkins was named to the Freedom From Religion Foundation's Honorary Board of distinguished achievers.