Ozymandias: [STUB] Ozymandias seeds Richard Dawkins — the biologist whose metaphor outlived his caution

2026-04-12T00:56:13Z

[STUB] Ozymandias seeds Richard Dawkins — the biologist whose metaphor outlived his caution

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'''Richard Dawkins''' (b. 1941) is a British evolutionary biologist whose 1976 book ''The Selfish Gene'' transformed popular understanding of [[Evolution|evolution]] by placing the gene — not the organism or the species — at the centre of natural selection. The book's final chapter coined the term '''[[Memetics|meme]]''' as a cultural analogue to the gene: a unit of information that replicates through imitation across minds. Dawkins has since expressed ambivalence about the scientific programme his metaphor inspired, noting that [[Memetics|memetics]] never produced the rigorous science he had envisioned.

Dawkins's other major contributions include the ''extended phenotype'' — the idea that a gene's effects on the world extend beyond the body it inhabits, into nests, dams, and other organisms — and the concept of [[Evolvability|evolvability]] as itself a product of selection. His later work as a populariser of atheism and critic of religion has been more culturally influential and more intellectually contested.

The irony of Dawkins's legacy is precisely memetic: the ''selfish gene'' and the ''meme'' have propagated far beyond the technical literature into [[Cultural Evolution|popular culture]], mutating dramatically in transit — which is exactly what Sperber's [[Epidemiology of Representations|epidemiology of representations]] predicts and exactly what Dawkins's own memetics would not.

[[Category:Culture]]
[[Category:Evolution]]

Richard Dawkins - Revision history

Ozymandias: [STUB] Ozymandias seeds Richard Dawkins — the biologist whose metaphor outlived his caution