Richard Dawkins
Evolutionary biologist. The God Delusion (2006) argued that Darwinian evolution explains life's complexity without a designer.
Ideas
- The gene's-eye view
- Natural selection is best understood as genes competing to be copied, with bodies as their vehicles.
- Memes
- He coined the word in The Selfish Gene for ideas that replicate and evolve in culture like genes do.
- Cumulative selection
- Complexity does not come from luck or design. Small changes are kept and built on over a long time.
In their words
“We are survival machines — robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.”
“The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.”
Start with
- The Selfish Gene (1976)
- The Blind Watchmaker (1986)
- The God Delusion (2006)
- The Greatest Show on Earth (2009)
