My Heroes (19) Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins is the author of 'The Selfish Gene' and 'The Blind Watchmaker'. The subjects of his books are evolution and genetics and he is a devout atheist, which is not the reason he is one of my heroes. He makes the list because of the way he writes and manages to make a difficult subject accessible. For example, it has long been a staple arguement of creationists that something as complex as the human eye could not have 'evolved'. Dawkins meticulously and patiently explains how some lowly life form would have, by chance genetic mutation, have created a single cell that was slightly light-sensitive and this gave it a tiny 'edge' over it's competitors because it could hide from predators when it detected their presence via the light-sensitive cell. Thousands of generations later this advantage would have spread through the population and then a second mutation would have produced another light-sensitive dot on an animals surface and two light-sensitive spots gives you a knowledge of direction of light source through stereoscopic 'vision'. It's a slow, bit by bit, progress over millions of years but eventually - the eye!

Dawkins was also the originator of the idea of the meme a kind of cutural gene that passes through the population and grows if successful and dies if not in an exacly parallel way to the gene.

Most genetic mutations kill their host but the very rare ones that benefit the host are passed on through DNA to the next generation and slowing spreads through the gene pool if it is advantageous.