Dawkins is Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford. He is considered to be one of the leading figures in modern evolutionary biology and has written extensively about evolution and science. Dawkins' first book The Selfish Gene (1976) was an immediate bestseller. In 1987, he won both the Royal Society of Literature Award and the Los Angeles Times Literary Prize for The Blind Watchmaker (1986) (the television film of the book won the Sci-Tech Prize for Best Science Programme). His numerous writings include studies of evolution, creationism, and genetics. In his most recent book Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder (1998), Dawkins examines the connections among science, mysticism, and human nature, and claims that "science, at its best, should leave room for poetry." In addition to receiving the Royal Society of Literature Award and the Los Angeles Times Literary Prize, Dawkins's awards and accomplishments include the 1989 Silver Medal of the Zoological Society of London and the 1990 Royal Society Michael Faraday Award for the furtherance of the public understanding of science. In 1998, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Dawkins was born in 1941 in Nairobi. His family returned to England in 1949. Dawkins completed his undergraduate and graduate work at Oxford under the instruction of Nobel Prize-winning biologist Niko Tinbergen. After a two-year stint between 1967 and 1969, as Assistant Professor of Zoology at UC Berkeley, he returned to Oxford where he became a fellow at New College, where he still teaches.

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