Climbing Mount Improbable

26 March 1941

Clinton Richard Dawkins, FRS, FRSL is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist and popular science author. He was formerly Professor for Public Understanding of Science at Oxford and was a fellow of New College, Oxford. Dawkins 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 made a widely cited contribution to evolutionary biology with the concept, presented in his book *The Extended Phenotype*, that the phenotypic effects of a gene are not necessarily limited to an organism's body, but can stretch far into the environment, including the bodies of other organisms. Dawkins is wel…