Beautiful Minds - Richard Dawkins

If you've been following this blog for a while, you're probably familiar with the various documentaries, debates and lectures Richard Dawkins has delivered over the years. Sure, his fame of late has to do with the religion/atheism and creationism/evolution controversies, but he's a much more important thinker than that. Dawkins is such a prolific thinker that even when he's wrong, he manages to make you think and to reconsider your own position. The man doesn't know how not to be interesting.

His original fame derives from a fabulous book he penned over 30 years ago: The Selfish Gene, which was originally inspired by the ground-breaking work of biologists like Bill Hamilton, and which provided a powerful and eloquent new way of understanding behaviors and traits that did not originally seem to conform to Darwinian natural selection, but which, after careful consideration, turned out to be remarkable revelations that confirmed and enhanced the theory.

The following documentary is all about the man, his story, his influence, his courage, his intellect and his ideas:

For a defense of The Selfish Gene, you might want to watch Nice Guys Finish First.