Clinton Richard Dawkins, FRS, FRSL (born 26 March 1941) is a British biological theorist with a background in ethology. He is a popular science author focusing on evolution. He popularised the gene-centred view of evolution, and the meme. Dawkins is one of Britain's best-known academics. He came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which popularised the gene-centred view of evolution and introduced the term meme. In 1982, he further developed the gene-centred view with his book The Extended Phenotype, emphasizing that the phenotypic effects of genes are not necessarily limited to an organism's body but can stretch via biochemistry and behaviour far into the web of life and the entire environment. He is well known as a presenter of the case for rationalism and scientific thinking. His later works continued to expand upon these ideas and their implications.Dawkins is one of the most widely publicised atheists. He is a prominent critic of religion, creationism and a wide variety of pseudoscience. In his 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker, he argued against the watchmaker analogy, an argument for the existence of a supernatural creator based upon the complexity of living organisms. Instead, he described a dysteleological perspective on the process of evolution by natural selection as "blind", without a design or a goal. In his 2006 million-selling book The God Delusion, he contended that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist, writing that such beliefs, based on faith rather than on evidence, qualify as a delusion. He was a co-founder of the Out Campaign, as a means of advancing atheism and freethought.
Dawkins retired from Oxford University in 2008 and continues to enjoy success as a writer and public figure which markedly increased with the publication of The God Delusion.
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