Richard Dawkins was born in Nairobi, Kenya, on March 26, 1941. He immigrated to England in 1949 with his parents, Clinton John, a farmer, and Jean Mary Vyvyan (Ladner). Earning his undergraduate degree at Balliol College, Oxford University in 1962, he remained to study under Niko Tinbergen, an eminent Danish biology and Nobel Prize winner for biology. After receiving his doctorate in 1966, Dawkins accepted a position as an assistant professor of zoology at the University of California at Berkeley, where he taught until 1969. In 1970 he returned to Oxford as a lecturer in zoology and a fellow of New College, becoming a reader in zoology in 1990. In 1995 he was awarded the newly endowed position as the Charles Simonyi Chair of Public Understanding of Science, where he remains currently. Divorced twice previously, Dawkins married actress and artist Lalla Ward in 1992.

Building on the ideas of Tinbergen, the first modern ethologist, Dawkins studied of the...