The Simonyi Professorship for the Public Understanding of Science is a chair at the University of Oxford. The chair was established in 1995 for the ethologist Richard Dawkins by an endowment from Charles Simonyi. The aim of the Professorship is 'to communicate science to the public without, in doing so, losing those elements of scholarship which constitute the essence of true understanding'. It is a position that had been endowed by Charles Simonyi with the express intention that the holder "be expected to make important contributions to the public understanding of some scientific field", and that its first holder should be Richard Dawkins.
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👉 Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science in the context of Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins (born 26 March 1941) is a British evolutionary biologist, zoologist, science communicator and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford. In 1995 he was named the first Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, a position he held until 2008, and is on the advisory board of the University of Austin. Dawkins has won several academic and writing awards, among them the 2005 Shakespeare Prize and the 2006 Lewis Thomas Prize. Presenting the latter, Paul Nurse said “In eloquent, evocative prose, Richard Dawkins conveys the certainty that, rather than diminishing the myriad beauties of the universe and extinguishing wonderment at its mysteries, science reveals truths that are yet more awe-inspiring than the mysteries they solve.”
Known as Darwin's Rottweiler, Dawkins has written a number of popular books explicating evolution. In The Selfish Gene (1976), he popularised the gene-centred view of evolution and coined the word meme. In The Blind Watchmaker (1986), he explains how the cumulative, non-random process of natural selection, coupled with random variation, creates complexity. In Climbing Mount Improbable (1996), he explores how evolution gradually creates complex adaptations through a series of intermediates. The book grew out of his Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, Growing Up in the Universe. With Yan Wong, he co-authored The Ancestor's Tale (2004), a “Chaucerian pilgrimage to the dawn of life.”