In Beautiful Minds Richard Dawkins reveals how he wrote his first book The Selfish Gene and how this set him on the path to become a spokesman for atheism.

One Of Science’s Most Beautiful Minds

Richard Dawkins has become some what of an enigma in his later years. Beautiful Minds explores Richard Dawkins’ life from very young age and reveals how he turned from a struggling school boy to becoming one of the most influential evolutionary thinkers of a generation. Richard Dawkins shocked the science world with his first bestseller The Selfish Gene. Since the release of The selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins has become one of the most cited science writers on the subject of evolution and atheism. What is undoubtably his most controversial book, The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins explores the reasons humans believe in gods and what effect it has on us as human being individuals and as a whole. Beautiful Minds – Richard Dawkins was first Broadcasted on BBC Four, 25 April 2012

Who is Richard Dawkins?

Richard Dawkins
“I am often accused of expressing contempt and despising religious people. I don’t despise religious people, I despise what they stand for.  I have so much respect for you, that I cannot respect your ridiculous ideas.” – Richard Dawkins

Born in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1941, Professor Richard Dawkins is one of the world’s leading scientific intellectuals, specializing in evolutionary biology. After undertaking his doctorate under the instruction of Nobel-prize winning ethologist Niko Tinbergen at Berkeley University of California, in 1967 he was appointed Assistant Professor of Zoology at Berkeley Dawkins returned to Oxford University, where he gained his degree, before becoming a fellow at New College, Oxford in 1970.

Professor Dawkins is an enormously successful writer. His first book, The Blind Watchmaker, published in 1976, was a huge success and has since been translated into 13 languages worldwide. His other books include: The Extended Phenotype (1982), The Selfish Gene (1989), River Our of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (1995), Climbing Mount Improbable (1996), Unweaving the Rainbow (1997), A Devil’s Chaplain (2003), The Ancestor’s Tale (2004) and The God Delusion (2006).

He has won countless awards and regularly lectures around the world. He widely accredits Charles Darwin as having a profound influence on his life and work, commenting in an interview with The National Geographic Channel Online that Darwin was “the founder of really everything that I do…whereas some people make a discovery and they stumble upon it, Darwin devoted himself to making his theory clear, to listing all the evidence and spending decades of his life gathering the evidence so no one could doubt it.”