Secondone
Here’s the translation of the provided HTML content to English, preserving all HTML tags:
Biographical Notes
His father fought for the Anglo-American-Russian alliance during World War II and went from England to Kenya. Richard Dawkins was born in Nairobi in 1941. The family returned to England in 1949. He studied at Oxford and graduated in 1962. He stayed in Oxford to do a doctorate with the ethologist Niko Tinbergen. He worked at the University of California, Berkeley as an assistant professor of zoology from 1967 to 1969. Since 1970 he has been a lecturer and Fellow of New College at Oxford University. In 1976, he published his first book, “The Selfish Gene”. He is also the holder of the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science, a newly created position.
Books
Richard Dawkins’s first book, “The Selfish Gene” (first edition 1976, second edition 1989), became one of the world’s most widely sold books. His book “The Blind Watchmaker” has also been translated into many languages around the world. Extended phenotype was published in 1982. Other notable books include River Out of Eden (1995), Climbing the Mount Improbable (1996), and Unweaving the Rainbow (1998).
Awards and Achievements
…
July 1995, from Wired magazine…
Born in East Africa, Dawkins was raised in one of the world’s most unique ecosystems. Joining Oxford for undergraduate studies in 1959, Dawkins came under the influence of Dane Niko Tinbergen. Tinbergen was the author of *The Study of Instinct* and a Nobel laureate for his pioneering work on animal behavior. Tinbergen was one of the modern ethologists. Tinbergen would ask – what is instinct? What behaviors do animals learn? How do we distinguish between instinct and learned behavior? How does behavior change? How do animals interact with other animals? What is the difference between the behavior of an animal in a group and its behavior alone? Why do animals help each other? Why do they compete with each other?
Ethology, as Tinbergen consistently emphasized, is a multi-disciplinary science that requires knowledge from many scientific fields. It requires insight into psychology, physiology, ecology, sociology, taxonomy, evolution, and so on to speak of it. He focused on the constant tension between seeing the range of behaviors found in nature and reducing them all to a few basic rules for scientists. “All I remember about his lectures are two phrases of his. ‘Behavioral engineering’ and ‘Survival factors.’ When I was writing my first book, I combined these two phrases into ‘survival machine’” says Dawkins.
Dawkins developed an excellent teacher-student relationship with Tinbergen. After a short period at Berkeley-University of California, he returned to the university where he had studied and became a Fellow in New College (and is still a teacher there).
His dual interest in the machinery of nature and the naturalness of machinery continued amid the great advances in molecular biology.
In 1953, after James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the double helix, molecular biologists took the lead in intellectual debates, surpassing even zoologists and moralists. Discovering and describing what each gene and genome does revolutionized how we understand nature. Through centuries of scientific experimentation on animals and plants, the close relationship between an organism’s genome and its behavior was well established. This provided a new scaffold for theories explaining evolution.
For Niko Tinbergen’s ethology, it was a way of looking at the world. Dawkins sought to separate and explain chicken behaviors individually. At the same time, he analyzed his research with punch cards on the Eliot 803 computer. This machine analogy strengthened Tinbergen’s concepts and ignited Dawkins’ own concept of gene importance. “What would happen to scientific thought if the survival machine was definitively a gene machine?”
Amidst these new conceptualizations, Richard Dawkins quickly transitioned from an ethologist to an evolutionary biologist. In 1965, he formulated a concept that could generate powerful effects but remained simple to understand. Dawkins proposed there was a “Gene Ethology.” How do genes interact with one another? Why is the behavior of individual genes different from their behavior in groups? How do genes cooperate? How do genes compete? He argued that the same questions moralists asked about chickens, ducks, and monkeys should be applied to genes and genomes.
Many had played with this idea before, but Dawkins adopted it and made it a strong leading thought in scientific culture.
As the first true gene ethologist, Dawkins became an evolutionary biologist. Over time, how do genes behave? Which genes come forward? Which die out? Which cooperate? Which compete? What changes? What remains the same? – This was his definition of evolution based on a stream of events.
When Dawkins published “The Selfish Gene” in 1976, it further heated up the debate. Are humans (human behaviors) governed by nature? Or by nurture? The discussion became increasingly prominent, especially among social biologists (Harvard social biologist E.O. Wilson’s 1975 book, *Sociobiology*). By discussing gene ethology, Dawkins shifted the debate from viewing a single animal as the fundamental object of evolution to focusing on nature, nurture and behavior. Through “The Selfish Gene,” he provided scientists with a bridge between mathematical molecular biology and the collection of details that is zoology, psychology, and sociology. In other words, the “Selfish Gene” metaphor transformed the double helix into human instincts.
When observing the richness of life on Earth and the intricate designs within it, Dawkins readily acknowledges that merely Mendelian genetics cannot account for evolution. Therefore, he incorporates cultural Darwinian thinking. He conceptualizes William Burroughs’ simple phrase “mind viruses” as memes. Just as genes are biological hereditary factors, memes function as cultural hereditary factors. For instance, a meme for astrology acts as a parasite within the human mind, much like a hookworm in one’s gut. These constructs compete, cooperate, mutate, and sometimes remain stable, mirroring gene behavior. Memes too, are subject to natural selection.
That wasn’t enough. Dawkins’ intellectual journey led him beyond Mendelian genetics and meme evolution, prompting an exploration of the revolutionary implications of evolutionary dynamics. This concept is remarkably simple but provided a powerful intellectual framework for understanding life as information in motion.
Dawkins asks what common trait genes and memes share: they are self-replicators. He terms these replicators – entities that create copies of themselves through various mechanisms, altering their environment to propagate their form, much like computer and biological viruses.
This was heretical to Darwinian scientists who dogmatically held that only an organism’s suitable environment mattered for natural selection. However, here the hidden replicator within an organism is what matters; evolution is simply the history of these replicators.
Dawkins vigorously championed this replicator concept, arguing it’s fundamentally absurd to discuss bird evolution without discussing nests or beaver evolution without dams. One provides a competitive advantage for the other. Just as an organism’s body obeys gene commands, the constructions and tools used by that organism also impact it. In this sense, the egg utilizes the hen and its nest as another evolutionary extension. Therefore, the bird-nest is an extended phenotype.
In biology, the genes within an egg are called its genotype, while the hen itself – its outward expression – is its phenotype. Dawkins termed the combination of organism (bird) and construction (nest) the extended phenotype. This concept linked the organism to its family, social structure, tools, and environment—all parts of the replicator’s manifestation in the world. Programs written within invisible genes alter vast portions of their living world.
Humanity possesses unparalleled advantages over other life forms due to the advanced technology in its grasp. Just as a bird’s nest, beaver’s dam, or mole’s burrow, our technology is an inseparable part of our evolution. According to Dawkins’ thought, it is meaningless for a scientist to discuss human evolution while ignoring human technological evolution. Humans evolve alongside their tools, according to Dawkins. Genes that do not evolve with tools will be extinguished.
When our evolutionary perspective becomes formalized, what happens to life – to artificial life? Because replicators’ cycles and the network of replicators built both survival and its evolution, Dawkins has forced a reassessment of basic biological tenets. Is our technology a need of our genes, or a cultural conspiracy of our genes and memes? Do we create and do our DNA control the industrial space in which we live? What do we mean when we say that nerve gas and microprocessors are expressions of our selfish genes? Scientists seeking gene-based foundations for embryology and neurophysiology should ask these questions as well.
Dawkins, reinterpreting survival, titled his book “The Origin of Replicators” and may have triggered a scientific revolution after Darwin. But Dawkins is not one to mock Darwin in this way, because Dawkins has great respect for Darwin’s natural selection theories. Already, his revolutionary thought is rapidly building steps in human minds as an excellent meme.
In 1987, Dawkins read “The Evolution of Evolvability” at the first Artificial Life Conference in Los Alamos, New Mexico. This article discusses that evolvability is a trait and has been naturally selected for evolution. The ability of genes to be affected by environment (e.g., sex) helps greatly with an organism’s evolutionary fitness. Dawkins’ paper is one that must be read by any group exploring artificial life. His knowledge across various fields, and his quality of linking them, are closely watched not only by popular readers but also by his fellow intellectuals such as Stephen Jay Gould, Marvin Minsky, Roger Penrose.
At 54, Dawkins has a few disciples. He prefers to award innovative thinking and research in artificial life himself. When speaking via email, he expressed his views as follows: “My prize goes to the computer program with an aesthetically pleasing world and three-dimensional creatures living in it. These creatures should achieve evolutionary variations due to not only abiotic factors such as temperature but also other creatures that undergo dimensional changes.”
July 1995