@AndrewGrimm It's hard to classify Dawkins' contribution to science and skepticism, but his education (to me) seems more generally zoology than evolutionary biology specifically. However, zoology isn't a much broader topic than evolutionary biology.

If I were to classify Dawkins' contribution and notoriety (which seems the relevant item at the moment), he's staunchly "religious skeptic" and his early work is obviously evolutionary biology (those works being The Selfish Gene and the Extended Phenotype).

In his most recent edition of The Selfish Gene, he interpolates before the final chapter which put forth his "meme theory", that this chapter specifically was more along the lines of interesting "thinking-out-loud" kind of stuff, but seems since first published to have caused a bit of a social revolution.

Within that social revolution Dawkins later work rests almost exclusively, saving his regular teaching at universities (which is probably mostly mundane).

So by his own words, Dawkins' is "merely an academic expert in biology in general, who popularised (as in wrote books and the like for the general public) the science of evolutionary biology".

This is not to denigrate the novelty of his meme theory circa 1975. I'm unaware of any earlier similar propositions, which might be grossly characterized as "thoughts that spread easily stick around for a long time or perhaps never die", that are as fleshed out and well thought. In the context of things like religion (notorious for seemingly useless rituals anf thoughts), Dawkins' meme theory put to rest the idea that obscurity is a sign of divinity.

If he wrote a hundred years earlier, I'd classify his contribution as "enlightenment". I don't know what to call it if it's from 1975.

All the other chapters that are actually about genes and evolution, Dawkins is certainly known and his theory that evolution should be viewed from the lens that gene are the replicators and everything else is just vehicles to replication is considered respectable, but not everyone fully buys in.

The question is, would his perspective on genes be as popular and well-known today if he never wrote the meme chapter? I think probably not, since whenever he's discussed today it's always about religious skepticism.

Almost all his books in the 90s to now are religious skepticism, and the ones that aren't are what I call "religious substitutionism", which is a kind way of saying "a book that says, 'see, evolution is true, therefore God doesn't exist'". If you've read God Delusion, I hope you'll laugh at that.

@LаngLаngС I don't do anything on SE anymore. I check in on a few chatrooms to see how old friends are doing. That's it.

I couldn't resist talking about Dawkins' meme theory above because, well, I'm a fan [blushing].

@fredsbend Yeah, I noticed. Sad thing. Am myself still between dial back and denial. That damned Kübler-Ross thing?

@langlangc the fact that the mods removed 4 questions indicate that the mods are doing at least something. My analysis was merely to see if hurtful content was more likely to be removed from the HNQ, and the answer was yes. Were you saying that something must have gone wrong that it hit the HNQ in the first place?

@AndrewGrimm That sth hits HNQ seems almost unavoidable. It's an algo. Some people upvote stuff, some answer subpar Qs etc. But the recent one about golf players really hit it home below par? More problems than fit into a comment, no response from seasoned OP, and ages for community moderation to kick in, no pro-active mod-action, tons of HNQ vote for……yeah. What is this? A Symptom?

Like for the Corona virus HNQ? Quality control seems on a marked downturn.