Richard Dawkins

William Donald Hamilton FRS was a British evolutionary biologist, widely recognised as one of the greatest evolutionary theorists of the 20th century. Hamilton became famous through his theoretical work expounding a rigorous genetic basis for the existence of kin selection and altruism, an insight... that was a key part of the development of a gene-centric view of evolution. He is considered one of the forerunners of sociobiology, as popularized by E. O. Wilson. Hamilton also published important work on sex ratios and the evolution of sex. From 1984 to his death in 2000, he was a Royal Society Research Professor at Oxford University. Hamilton was born in 1936 in Cairo, Egypt, the second of seven children. His father A. M. Hamilton was a New Zealand-born engineer. His mother B. M. Hamilton was a medical doctor, also from New Zealand. The Hamilton family settled in Kent. During the Second World War, the young Hamilton was evacuated to Edinburgh. He had an interest in natural history from an early age and would spend his spare time collecting butterflies and other insects. In 1946 he discovered E.B.
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Professor George Christopher Williams was an American evolutionary biologist. Williams was a professor emeritus of biology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He was best known for his vigorous critique of group selection. The work of Williams in this area, along with W. D.... Hamilton, John Maynard Smith and others led to the development of a gene-centric view of evolution in the 1960s. Williams' 1957 paper Pleiotropy, Natural Selection, and the Evolution of Senescence is one of the most influential in 20th century evolutionary biology, and contains at least 3 foundational ideas. The central hypothesis of antagonistic pleiotropy remains the prevailing evolutionary explanation of senescence. In this paper Williams was also the first to propose that senescence should be generally synchronized by natural selection. According to this original formulation "if the adverse genic effects appeared earlier in one system than any other, they would be removed by selection from that system more readily than from any other. In other words, natural selection will always be in greatest opposition to the decline of the most senescence-prone system.
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Daniel Clement Dennett is an American philosopher, writer and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. He is currently the Co-director of... the Center for Cognitive Studies, the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and a University Professor at Tufts University. Dennett is a firm atheist and secularist, a member of the Secular Coalition for America advisory board, as well as an outspoken supporter of the Brights movement. Dennett is referred to as one of the "Four Horsemen of New Atheism," along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Dennett spent part of his childhood in Lebanon, where, during World War II, his father was a covert counter-intelligence agent with the Office of Strategic Services posing as a cultural attaché to the American Embassy in Beirut. When he was five, his mother took him back to Massachusetts after his father died in an unexplained plane crash. His sister is the investigative journalist Charlotte Dennett.
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Nikolaas "Niko" Tinbergen FRS was a Dutch ethologist and ornithologist who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Karl von Frisch and Konrad Lorenz for their discoveries concerning organization and elicitation of individual and social behaviour patterns in animals. In the 1960s... he collaborated with filmmaker Hugh Falkus on a series of wildlife films, including The Riddle of the Rook and Signals for Survival , which won the Italia prize in that year and the American blue ribbon in 1971. Born in The Hague, Netherlands, he is also noted as the brother of Jan Tinbergen, who won the first Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. He had a third eminent brother, Luuk Tinbergen who committed suicide in 1955 at age 39. Tinbergen's interest in nature manifested itself when he was young. He studied biology at Leiden University and was a prisoner of war during World War II. Tinbergen's experience as a prisoner of the Nazis led to some friction with longtime intellectual collaborator Konrad Lorenz, and it was several years before the two reconciled.
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Robert L. Trivers is an American evolutionary biologist and sociobiologist and Professor of Anthropology and Biological Sciences at Rutgers... University. Trivers is most noted for proposing the theories of reciprocal altruism , parental investment , facultative sex ratio determination , and parent-offspring conflict . Other areas in which he has made influential contributions include an adaptive view of self-deception and intragenomic conflict. A 1961 graduate of Phillips Academy, Andover, Trivers went to Harvard University to study mathematics, but went on to study American history in preparation to become a lawyer. He received his bachelor's degree in history on June 16, 1965 from Harvard. He took a psychology class after suffering a breakdown, and was very unimpressed with the state of psychology. He was prevented from getting into Yale law school by his breakdown, and so took a job writing social science textbooks for children that were never published.
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Steven Arthur Pinker is a Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist and popular science author. He is a Harvard... College Professor and the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and is known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. Pinker's academic specializations are visual cognition and psycholinguistics. His experimental subjects include mental imagery, shape recognition, visual attention, children's language development, regular and irregular phenomena in language, the neural bases of words and grammar, and the psychology of innuendo and euphemism. He published two technical books which proposed a general theory of language acquisition and applied it to children's learning of verbs. In his popular books, he has argued that language is an "instinct" or biological adaptation shaped by natural selection. He is the author of six books for a general audience: The Language Instinct , How the Mind Works , Words and Rules , The Blank Slate , The Stuff of Thought , and The Better Angels of Our Nature .
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Stephen Jay Gould was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was also one of the most influential and... widely read writers of popular science of his generation. Gould spent most of his career teaching at Harvard University and working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In the latter years of his life, Gould also taught biology and evolution at New York University near his home in SoHo. Gould's most significant contribution to science was the theory of punctuated equilibrium, which he developed with Niles Eldredge in 1972. The theory proposes that most evolution is marked by long periods of evolutionary stability, which is punctuated by rare instances of branching evolution. The theory was contrasted against phyletic gradualism, the popular idea that evolutionary change is marked by a pattern of smooth and continuous change in the fossil record. Most of Gould's empirical research was based on the land snail genera Poecilozonites and Cerion. He also contributed to evolutionary developmental biology, and has received wide praise for his book Ontogeny and Phylogeny.
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