October 20th, 2009
The Atheism Tapes: Richard Dawkins
In these off-the-record interviews, playwright, filmmaker and self-described atheist Jonathan Miller filmed conversations with six of today’s leading men of letters and science: the biologist and New York Times best-selling author Richard Dawkins, philosophers Daniel Dennett and Colin McGinn, distinguished playwright Arthur Miller, theologian Denys Turner and Nobel Prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg, who discuss their personal intellectual journeys and offer an illuminating analysis of nontheism from a wide range of perspectives.
This is one of a 6-part series featuring leading leaders in Atheism. Other conversations are with Daniel Dennet, Denys Turner, Arthur Miller, Steven Weinberg, and Colin McGinn.
View the first part on Snag Films.
Richard Dawkins is a British biological theorist with a background in ethology. He is a popular science author focusing on evolution.
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:The Gene as the Unit of Selection, emphasizing that the phenotypic effects of genes are not necessarily limited to an organism’s body but can stretch via biochemistry and behaviour into other organisms and the 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 world’s 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: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design, 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 remains a writer and public figure.
(Biographical information from Wikipedia. Want to learn more about Richard Dawkins?)
