In the United Kingdom the term often retains its positive sense as a reference to natural selection, and for example Richard Dawkins wrote in his collection of essays A Devil's Chaplain, published in 2003, that as a scientist he is a Darwinist.

As Dawkins explains, " As soon as I finished it, I turned back to page one and read it straight through again – the only time I have ever done that, and I wrote to tell him so.

In its preface, Dawkins states that he wrote the book " to persuade the reader, not just that the Darwinian world-view happens to be true, but that it is the only known theory that could, in principle, solve the mystery of our existence.

British ethologist Richard Dawkins wrote about autocatalysis as a potential explanation for abiogenesis in his 2004 book The Ancestor's Tale.

In October 2011, Chopra wrote a critical review of Richard Dawkins ' book The Magic of Reality in the Huffington Post.

Dawkins wrote at the end:

In retort, Dawkins wrote that the book practices reductionism by distorting arguments in terms of genetics to " an idiotic travesty ( that the properties of a complex whole are simply the sum of those same properties in the parts )", and accused the authors of giving " ideology priority over truth ".

Huxley's Red Strangers was republished by Penguin Books in 1999 and by Penguin Classics in 2000 ; Richard Dawkins played an important role in getting the book to be republished, and he wrote a preface to the new edition.

Richard Dawkins wrote in The Selfish Gene in 1976 that " there are some examples of cultural evolution in birds and monkeys, but ... it is our own species that really shows what cultural evolution can do ".

In retort, Dawkins wrote that the book practices reductionism by distorting arguments in terms of genetics to " an idiotic travesty ( that the properties of a complex whole are simply the sum of those same properties in the parts )", and accused the authors of giving " ideology priority over truth ".

In response to criticism over the use of the term " cattle " to describe non-believers, Hasan wrote in his New Statesman blog: " The Quranic phrase ' people of no intelligence ' simply and narrowly refers to the fact that Muslims regard their views on God as the only intellectually tenable position, just as atheists ( like Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris ) regard believers as fundamentally irrational and, even, mentally deficient.

Dennett's views on evolution are identified as being strongly adaptationist, in line with his theory of the intentional stance, and the evolutionary views of biologist Richard Dawkins.

Mayr rejected the idea of a gene-centered view of evolution and starkly but politely criticized Richard Dawkins ' ideas:

* The ESS was a major element used to analyze evolution in Richard Dawkins ' bestselling 1976 book The Selfish Gene.

Dawkins asserts that the atheists ' position is not a fundamentalism that is unable to change its mind, but is held based on the verifiable evidence ; as he puts it: " The true scientist, however passionately he may " believe " in evolution for example, knows exactly what would change his mind: evidence!

For Dawkins, the meme exemplified another self-replicating unit with potential significance in explaining human behavior and cultural evolution.

Dawkins likened the process by which memes survive and change through the evolution of culture to the natural selection of genes in biological evolution.

Richard Dawkins noted the three conditions that must exist for evolution to occur:

Dawkins emphasizes that the process of evolution naturally occurs whenever these conditions co-exist, and that evolution does not apply only to organic elements such as genes.

In keeping with the thesis that in evolution one can regard organisms simply as suitable " hosts " for reproducing genes, Dawkins argues that one can view people as " hosts " for replicating memes.

Although social scientists such as Max Weber sought to understand and explain religion in terms of a cultural attribute, Richard Dawkins called for a re-analysis of religion in terms of the evolution of self-replicating ideas apart from any resulting biological advantages they might bestow.

A handicap in this process is the difficulty of seeing and manipulation at the nanoscale compared to the macroscale which makes deterministic selection of successful trials difficult ; in contrast biological evolution proceeds via action of what Richard Dawkins has called the " blind watchmaker "

Memetics is a theory of mental content based on an analogy with Darwinian evolution, originating from the popularization of Richard Dawkins ' 1976 book The Selfish Gene.

In his book, Dawkins contended that the meme is a unit of information residing in the brain and is the mutating replicator in human cultural evolution.

His first point is to argue that phyletic gradualism — understood in the sense that evolution proceeds at a single uniform rate of speed, called " constant speedism " by Dawkins — is a " caricature of Darwinism " and " does not really exist.

According to Dawkins, evolution certainly occurred but " probably gradually " elsewhere.

As Dawkins acknowledges, however, the weasel program is an imperfect analogy for evolution, as " offspring " phrases were selected " according to the criterion of resemblance to a distant ideal target.

" In contrast, Dawkins affirms, evolution has no long-term plans and does not progress toward some distant goal ( such as humans ).

" Its willingness to engage positively with, and avoid taking sides against, religiously minded supporters of evolution has been noted by prominent historian of creationism Ronald L. Numbers and prominent atheist Richard Dawkins.

This term is also used in the scientific literature, with the academic publishers Blackwell Publishing referring to " neo-Darwinism as practised today ", and some figures in the study of evolution like Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould, using the term in their writings and lectures.

The Selfish Gene is a book on evolution by Richard Dawkins, published in 1976.

Dawkins coined the term " selfish gene " as a way of expressing the gene-centred view of evolution as opposed to the views focused on the organism and the group, popularizing ideas developed during the 1960s by W. D. Hamilton and others.

According to Richard Dawkins, a distinction between agnosticism and atheism is unwieldy and depends on how close to zero we are willing to rate the probability of existence for any given god-like entity.

" A person ranking at 7 on the scale would be a person who says " I know there is no God ..." Dawkins places himself at 6 on the scale, which he characterizes as " I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there ", but leaning toward 7.

Richard Dawkins in his book River Out of Eden used the computer bootstrapping concept to explain how biological cells differentiate: " Different cells receive different combinations of chemicals, which switch on different combinations of genes, and some genes work to switch other genes on or off.

Among its more famous critics are the evolutionary biologists Richard Dawkins, Ford Doolittle, and Stephen Jay Gould – notable, given the diversity of this trio's views on other scientific matters.

The word meme is a shortening ( modeled on gene ) of mimeme ( from Ancient Greek μίμημα mīmēma, " something imitated ", from μιμεῖσθαι mimeisthai, " to imitate ", from μῖμος mimos " mime ") and it was coined by the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene ( 1976 ) as a concept for discussion of evolutionary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena.

Burman, by contrast, has shown that the misunderstanding that memes are " real " is a result of a popularization based on a confused interpretation of Dawkins ' The Selfish Gene.

Following Dawkins ' retirement from the NFL on April 23, 2012, the Eagles announced that they would retire his number.

In his book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, biologist Richard Dawkins grapples with the question of why pain has to be so very painful.

The idea of the phenotype has been generalized by Richard Dawkins in The Extended Phenotype to mean all the effects a gene has on the outside world that may influence its chances of being replicated.

Dawkins also cites the effect of an organism on the behaviour of another organism ( such as the devoted nurturing of a cuckoo by a parent of a different species ) as an example of the extended phenotype.

– Discussion with atheists Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker on Edge Foundation.

Perutz attacked the theories of philosophers Sir Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn and biologist Richard Dawkins in a lecture given at Cambridge on ' Living Molecules ' in 1994.

Dawkins writes that gene combinations which help an organism to survive and reproduce tend to also improve the gene's own chances of being passed on and, as a result, frequently " successful " genes will also be beneficial to the organism.

In 1976, Arthur Cain, one of Dawkins's tutors at Oxford in the 1960s, called it a " young man ’ s book " ( which Dawkins points out was a deliberate quote of a commentator on A. J.

Eldredge notes that in Dawkins ' book A Devil's Chaplain, which was published just before Eldredge's book, " Richard Dawkins comments on what he sees as the main difference between his position and that of the late Stephen Jay Gould.