The following list of publications by Richard Dawkins is a chronological list of papers, articles, essays and books published by British ethologist and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.
He has also written many book reviews and newspaper articles which are not listed on this page.
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of February 2024 (link)Richard Dawkins has also written forewords to books, including: [3]
An annual plant is a plant that completes its life cycle, from germination to the production of seeds, within one growing season, and then dies. Globally, only 6% of all plant species and 15% of herbaceous plants are annuals. The annual life cycle has independently emerged in over 120 different plant families throughout the entire angiosperm phylogeny.
Kin selection is a process whereby natural selection favours a trait due to its positive effects on the reproductive success of an organism's relatives, even when at a cost to the organism's own survival and reproduction. Kin selection can lead to the evolution of altruistic behaviour. It is related to inclusive fitness, which combines the number of offspring produced with the number an individual can ensure the production of by supporting others. A broader definition of kin selection includes selection acting on interactions between individuals who share a gene of interest even if the gene is not shared due to common ancestry.
William Donald Hamilton was a British evolutionary biologist, recognised as one of the most significant evolutionary theorists of the 20th century. Hamilton became known for his theoretical work expounding a rigorous genetic basis for the existence of altruism, an insight that was a key part of the development of the gene-centered view of evolution. He is considered one of the forerunners of sociobiology. Hamilton published important work on sex ratios and the evolution of sex. From 1984 to his death in 2000, he was a Royal Society Research Professor at Oxford University.
Behavioral ecology, also spelled behavioural ecology, is the study of the evolutionary basis for animal behavior due to ecological pressures. Behavioral ecology emerged from ethology after Niko Tinbergen outlined four questions to address when studying animal behaviors: What are the proximate causes, ontogeny, survival value, and phylogeny of a behavior?
Group selection is a proposed mechanism of evolution in which natural selection acts at the level of the group, instead of at the level of the individual or gene.
George Christopher Williams was an American evolutionary biologist.
In evolutionary biology, inclusive fitness is one of two metrics of evolutionary success as defined by W. D. Hamilton in 1964:
Robin Ian MacDonald Dunbar is a British biological anthropologist, evolutionary psychologist, and specialist in primate behaviour. Dunbar is professor emeritus of evolutionary psychology of the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford. He is best known for formulating Dunbar's number, a measurement of the "cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships".
A unit of selection is a biological entity within the hierarchy of biological organization that is subject to natural selection. There is debate among evolutionary biologists about the extent to which evolution has been shaped by selective pressures acting at these different levels.
Within evolutionary biology, signalling theory is a body of theoretical work examining communication between individuals, both within species and across species. The central question is when organisms with conflicting interests, such as in sexual selection, should be expected to provide honest signals rather than cheating. Mathematical models describe how signalling can contribute to an evolutionarily stable strategy.
The gene-centered view of evolution, gene's eye view, gene selection theory, or selfish gene theory holds that adaptive evolution occurs through the differential survival of competing genes, increasing the allele frequency of those alleles whose phenotypic trait effects successfully promote their own propagation. The proponents of this viewpoint argue that, since heritable information is passed from generation to generation almost exclusively by DNA, natural selection and evolution are best considered from the perspective of genes.
In biology, altruism refers to behaviour by an individual that increases the fitness of another individual while decreasing their own. Altruism in this sense is different from the philosophical concept of altruism, in which an action would only be called "altruistic" if it was done with the conscious intention of helping another. In the behavioural sense, there is no such requirement. As such, it is not evaluated in moral terms—it is the consequences of an action for reproductive fitness that determine whether the action is considered altruistic, not the intentions, if any, with which the action is performed.
The timeline of human evolution outlines the major events in the evolutionary lineage of the modern human species, Homo sapiens, throughout the history of life, beginning some 4 billion years ago down to recent evolution within H. sapiens during and since the Last Glacial Period.
Genome size is the total amount of DNA contained within one copy of a single complete genome. It is typically measured in terms of mass in picograms or less frequently in daltons, or as the total number of nucleotide base pairs, usually in megabases. One picogram is equal to 978 megabases. In diploid organisms, genome size is often used interchangeably with the term C-value.
The green-beard effect is a thought experiment used in evolutionary biology to explain selective altruism among individuals of a species.
Mate choice is one of the primary mechanisms under which evolution can occur. It is characterized by a "selective response by animals to particular stimuli" which can be observed as behavior. In other words, before an animal engages with a potential mate, they first evaluate various aspects of that mate which are indicative of quality—such as the resources or phenotypes they have—and evaluate whether or not those particular trait(s) are somehow beneficial to them. The evaluation will then incur a response of some sort.
Csaba Pal is a Hungarian biologist at the Biological Research Centre (BRC) in Szeged Hungary. His laboratory is part of the Synthetic and Systems Biology Unit at BRC. His research is at the interface of evolution, antibiotic resistance and genome engineering and has published over 80 scientific publications in these areas.
Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity is a book by anthropologist Brian Hare and writer Vanessa Woods, first published in 2020, based on Hare's research hypothesis of human self-domestication. The main thesis of the book is that late in human evolution Homo sapiens underwent a process of extreme selection for friendliness that led to the self-domestication syndrome, as seen in other animals. The self-domestication syndrome led to a series of cognitive changes that allowed modern humans to out compete other species of humans in the Pleistocene, including Neanderthals, and become the most successful mammal on the planet. Hare and Woods argue that self-domestication is an ongoing process that continues today.
H. Jane Brockmann is an emeritus professor at the University of Florida known for her research on animal behavior, especially in the mating and nesting behavior of horseshoe crabs. In 2008, she was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The sensory trap hypothesis describes an evolutionary idea that revolves around mating behavior and female mate choice. It is a model of female preference and male sexual trait evolution through what is known as sensory exploitation. Sensory exploitation, or a sensory trap is an event that occurs in nature where male members of a species perform behaviors or display visual traits that resemble a non-sexual stimulus which females are responsive to. This tricks females into engaging with the males, thus creating more mating opportunities for males. What makes it a sensory trap is that these female responses evolved in a non-sexual context, and the male produced stimulus exploits the female response which would not otherwise occur without the mimicked stimulus.
