Richard Dawkins
British · b. 1941
An evolutionary biologist and popular science writer, best known for The Selfish Gene (1976), which introduced the concept of the meme and reframed natural selection from the perspective of replicating genes. His later work The God Delusion (2006) made him one of the public faces of New Atheism alongside Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett. In recent years he has been increasingly visible on social media, where his contrarian takes on literature, politics, and culture — including a viral tweet dismissing Kafka's Metamorphosis as overrated — have earned him both fans and critics.
Episodes
- 67. Middlemarch, part 1: A wish-fulfilment fantasy for spergy scholars
- 49. C.P. Snow's The Two Cultures: the original stemcels vs shape rotators beef
- 45. Anna Karenina part 2: I am begging you to touch grass
- 18. Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis: A Bug's Life
- 14. The Razor's Edge, part 3: Climbing off the wheel of suffering
- 7. Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse, part 2: Portrait of the autist as an old man
Fleeting mentions
- 38. DeLillo's White Noise: psy-opping ourselves on death and po-mo
- 28. Ted Chiang's Understand: Intelligence explosions and AI doom
- 11. Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, part 3: Was David Foster Wallace a hideous man?
- 6. Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse, part 1: Skill issue
- 2. Michel Houellebecq's Map and the Territory, part 2: Post-industrial society and its discontents