Dawkins on Darwin
Professor Richard Dawkins delivered this year's Open University lecture at the Natural History Museum on Tuesday 17th March 2009. Dawkins’ presented to an invited audience and investigated if Darwin was the most revolutionary scientist ever, and examined the evolutionary theories of his contemporaries.
Dawkins suggests that there are four "bridges to evolutionary understanding" and illustrates this with four claimants to the evolution of natural selection: Edward Blyth, Patrick Matthew, Alfred Wallace and Charles Darwin. The fifth bridge of evolutionary understanding is identified as modern genetics – which he terms digital Darwinism.
The Open University annual lecture started as a joint project with BBC4 to ask distinguished academics from within or outside the university to give a lecture – much in the way other universities do. As we have the partnership with the BBC it was a way for the OU to develop a lecture series with impact. The first lecturer, Ian Kershaw, was suggested by the Arts Faculty and his lecture fitted well with the BBC history output for that year, the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II.
As soon as the Darwin anniversary came into view Richard Dawkins was approached to give what would have been the 2009 annual lecture. The anniversary is a double one, 200 years since Darwin’s birth and 150 years since the publication of ‘On the origin of species’, so who better to give the OU annual lecture than the leading author on the subject of evolution and natural selection.
Watch the lecture online:
Natural selection
Random chance, design or natural selection? Dawkins explores how Darwin and his peers solved the riddle of life: Natural selection
The struggle for existence
Dawkins analyses the developing ideas of Darwin and the realisation of the tree of life: Struggle for existence
The digital bridge
Dawkin explores the idea’s of Darwin’s peers and discusses how close Darwin came to Mendelism: The digital bridge
Post lecture discussion
The panel answer audience questions and explore the science of being nice in a: post lecture discussion
Download the discussion
A full mp3 of the post lecture discussion including: Download the discussion
Find out more:
Evolution on your wall
The Open University presents a lavish guide to evolution: Order your free Tree Of Life poster.
More about the man
See how you'd look if you "devolve" yourself and discover more Darwin from the OU.
Content last updated: 06/04/2009
About our lecturer
Richard Dawkins is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist and popular science author. He was the first holder of the Charles Simonyi Chair of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, and a Fellow of New College, Oxford. He came to prominence with the release of The Selfish Gene in 1976, before following it up with more best-sellers including River Out of Eden, Climbing Mount Improbable, and most recently, The God Delusion. Dawkins is a Fellow of both the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Literature. He is the recipient of numerous honours and awards, including the 1987 Royal Society of Literature Award, the Shakespeare Prize in 2005 and was named Author of the Year at the 2007 Galaxy British book Awards.
