Richard Dawkins (1941-) is the world’s most famous atheist, thanks to his best-selling book The God Delusion and his tireless work to promote secularism through media and public appearances. Though he is probably more well-known today for his views on religion, Dawkins is first and foremost an evolutionary biologist. He has dedicated his life to studying evolution and to him it must be so bleeding obvious, and so much more awe-inspiring and beautiful, that the complexity of life on Earth is thanks to Natural Selection rather than Intelligent Design.

– Thanks to Martin for submitting this. It’s taken from Dawkins’ book Unweaving the Rainbow. I also read it in the forward to Christopher Hitchens’ memoir Hitch-22.

– Dawkins features in the brilliant documentary series Inside Nature’s Giants, where animals are dissected to help illustrate how they work and where they evolved from. Highly recommended, but not for the squeamish. (The whole series is on YouTube)