Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins (b. 1941) is a British evolutionary biologist whose 1976 book The Selfish Gene transformed popular understanding of 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 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 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 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 popular culture, mutating dramatically in transit — which is exactly what Sperber's epidemiology of representations predicts and exactly what Dawkins's own memetics would not.