A Devil's Chaplain

Author: Richard Dawkins

Genre: Science / Scientific Divulgation

Language: English

Description:

Richard Dawkins's essays are an enthusiastic testament to the power of rigorous, scientific examination, and they span many different corners of his personal and professional life.

He revisits the meme, the unit of cultural information that he named and wrote about in his groundbreaking work The Selfish Gene. He makes moving tributes to friends and colleagues, including a eulogy for novelist Douglas Adams; he shares correspondence with the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould; and he visits with the famed paleoanthropologists Richard and Maeve Leakey at their African wildlife preserve.

He concludes the essays with a vivid note to his ten-year-old daughter, reminding her to remain curious, to ask questions, and to live the examined life.

'One of the best-known scientists and writers of our time, Dawkins unashamedly and gloriously delights in science. If anything is sacred to him it is the truth and the patient road to it... He is a superb writer, and a great advocate for sanity, and a nendlessly informative resource.' New Republic