The Great Evolutionary Biologist Richard Dawkins … born in Colonial Africa!

---

---

[I was quite astounded to discover that Richard Dawkins was born in Africa. He lived in Kenya, where the Mau Mau later cut the Whites up. And I see he lived in Nyasaland, which is now known as Malawi, and which also was part of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. This is something I'll discuss another day. Of course both Kenya and Malawi went downhill under Black rule. Surely Dawkins has seen this and understood this? Jan]

Here is an excerpt from his wikipedia page:

Early life

Clinton Richard Dawkins was born on 26 March 1941 in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya during British colonial rule.[13] Dawkins later dropped Clinton from his name by deed poll.[7] He is the son of Jean Mary Vyvyan (née Ladner; 1916–2019)[14][15] and Clinton John Dawkins (1915–2010), an agricultural civil servant in the British Colonial Service in Nyasaland (present-day Malawi), of an Oxfordshire landed gentry family.[13][16][17] His father was called up into the King’s African Rifles during the Second World War[18][19] and returned to England in 1949, when Dawkins was eight. His father had inherited a country estate, Over Norton Park in Oxfordshire, which he farmed commercially.[17] Dawkins lives in Oxford, England.[20] He has a younger sister, Sarah.[21]

His parents were interested in natural sciences, and they answered Dawkins’s questions in scientific terms.[22] Dawkins describes his childhood as "a normal Anglican upbringing".[23] He embraced Christianity until halfway through his teenage years, at which point he concluded that the theory of evolution alone was a better explanation for life’s complexity, and ceased believing in a god.[21] Dawkins states: "The main residual reason why I was religious was from being so impressed with the complexity of life and feeling that it had to have a designer, and I think it was when I realised that Darwinism was a far superior explanation that pulled the rug out from under the argument of design. And that left me with nothing."[21] This understanding of atheism combined with his western cultural background, informs Dawkins as he describes himself in several interviews as a "cultural Christian" and a "cultural Anglican".[24][25][26]

Education

The Great Hall, Oundle School

On his return to England from Nyasaland in 1949, at the age of eight, Dawkins joined Chafyn Grove School, in Wiltshire,[27] and after that from 1954 to 1959 attended Oundle School in Northamptonshire, an English public school with a Church of England ethos,[21] where he was in Laundimer House.[28] While at Oundle, Dawkins read Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian for the first time.[29] He studied zoology at Balliol College, Oxford, graduating in 1962; while there, he was tutored by Nobel Prize-winning ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen. He graduated with second-class honours.[30]

He continued as a research student under Tinbergen’s supervision, receiving his Doctor of Philosophy[31] degree by 1966, and remained a research assistant for another year.[32][33] Tinbergen was a pioneer in the study of animal behaviour, particularly in the areas of instinct, learning, and choice;[34] Dawkins’s research in this period concerned models of animal decision-making.[35] He was awarded a DSc by Oxford in 1989.[33][32]

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins

---

---

xxxxx Sign Up