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The God Delusion is a 2006 book by British evolutionary biologist and ethologist Richard Dawkins.In The God Delusion, Dawkins contends that a supernatural creator, God, almost certainly does not exist, and that belief in a personal god qualifies as a delusion, which he defines as a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence.
The Selfish Genius: How Richard Dawkins Rewrote Darwin's Legacy is a 2009 book by Fern Elsdon-Baker about the history of evolutionary theory, published to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species.
McGrath examines Dawkins' use of Bertrand Russell's teapot analogy as well as the basics of Dawkins' theory of Memetics. McGrath criticizes Dawkins for referencing Sir James Frazer 's The Golden Bough as an authority on anthropology, as he considers the work to be more of "a highly impressionistic early work" than a serious text.
Dawkins builds upon George C. Williams's book Adaptation and Natural Selection (1966), which argued that altruism is not based upon group benefit per se, [4] but results from selection that occurs "at the level of the gene mediated by the phenotype" [5] and that any selection at the group level occurred only under rare circumstances. [6]
The reviews of the book have been mixed, but the controversial title phrase, "How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think" has been explained by considering Dawkins to have worked as an influential educator and concise author, of The Selfish Gene, who promoted the key ideas of others about evolutionary biology, also including some controversial ideas which are not as widely accepted. [1]
Dawkins uses this technique to reverse-engineer the purpose in the mind of the Divine Engineer of Nature, or the Utility Function of God. According to Dawkins, it is a mistake to assume that an ecosystem or a species as a whole exists for a purpose. In fact, it is wrong to suppose that individual organisms lead a meaningful life either.
Dawkins vs. Gould: Survival of the Fittest is a book about the differing views of biologists Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould by philosopher of biology Kim Sterelny. When published in 2001 it became an international best-seller.
Richard Dawkins (born 26 March 1941) [3] is a British evolutionary biologist, zoologist, science communicator, and author. [4] He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was Professor for Public Understanding of Science in the University of Oxford from 1995 to 2008.