Which dawkins book first

In the family relocated back to England and in Richard enrolled as a student at the University of Oxford, Balliol College where he got a bachelors in Zoology in He went on to get his Masters and Doctorate from Oxford, learning under Nikolaas Tinbergen the ethologist. He was an assistant for Tinbergen for a while until he relocated to the United States, where he became a professor of zoology at the University of California, Berkeley between and In he went back to Oxford and taught Zoology for several years.

Over the years, he has won several writing prestigious writing and academic awards and made regular Internet, radio, and television appearances where he discusses his opinions, ideas, his atheism and his books as a public intellectual.

He was responsible for the introduction of the concept of phenotypic effects of a gene stretching into their environment rather than just being limited to the body of the organism. He is one of the most outspoken atheists and is known for criticizing intelligent design and creationism. Instead, he argues that evolution works in a process similar to that of a blind watchmaker. For Dawkins, mutation, reproduction, and selection are unguided by any form of intelligent design.

He asserted that natural selection is driven by the gene rather than the individual or species as most people believed it to be. He argues that genes use the bodies of species to further their own survival. It is in the book that he came up with the meme, which he called the equivalent of the gene.

Concepts and ideas from music to fashion typically take a life of their own and mutate and propagate within society to affect human evolution and progress. In the book, he emphasized how evolution was a natural and gradual response to pressure as he explained that sophisticated and intricate structures do not manifest randomly.

For instance, the eye is the product of selective pressure to be better, which results in successive improvements in sophisticated. His polemical discussions in The God Delusion generated more controversy than any other of his books. The book explains the logical fallacies inherent in religious thought and makes the conclusion that it is improbable that there exists an omnipotent creator. With wit and rigor, Dawkins examines God as a sex-obsessed tyrant who is introduced in the Old Testament and the still illogical but benign Celestial Watchmaker that is the favorite trope of enlightenment thinkers.

He destroys the main arguments for religion by demonstrating how improbable it would be to have a supreme being.

He then goes on to show how religion drives child abuse, foments bigotry, and fuels war using contemporary and historical evidence.

It provides some exhilarating insights into the advantages of atheism to society and the individual. Dawkins says that there is no truer or clearer appreciation of the wonders of the universe that could be explained by any religion.

He takes a radical view of evolution by focusing on the gene as the unit of incremental change. Dawkins — in a style that would recur in later polemical books such as The God Delusion — was never less than comprehensive in his ambitions.

Orthodox neo-Darwinian he might be, but in chapter 11, he coined an idea about cultural transmission that quickly went viral within the global intellectual community: the meme, or replicator, a unit of imitation.

DNA works in mysterious ways. You can call me a big bad wolf but not a bore, says Richard Dawkins. Read more. Richard Dawkins: 'I don't think I am strident or aggressive'.

Topics Richard Dawkins best nonfiction books of all time Science and nature books Evolution Genetics features. Eight books and 30 years later, he wrote The God Delusion , which reinvented him as a ferocious advocate for atheism.

He chose his subjects well: during his writing career, evolution and religion have emerged as fronts in an increasingly vicious culture war between what he would characterise as the forces of darkness and superstition and those of enlightenment and reason.

Yes, Outgrowing God , which is for young people. It covers a lot of familiar Dawkins territory, not just God but also evolution. Why did you feel that people need more on these topics?