Clinton Richard Dawkins is an English ethologist, evolutionary biologist, and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was the University of Oxford's Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008. Dawkins was born in Nairobi, then in British Kenya, on 26 March 1941. He is the son of Jean Mary Vyvyan and Clinton John Dawkins, an agricultural civil servant in the British Colonial Service in Nyasaland. Dawkins first came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which popularised the gene-centered view of evolution and introduced the term meme. River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life is a 1995 popular science. The book's initial premise is that the "purpose" of life is the transmission of DNA down through the generations. Dawkins offers the metaphor of a river branching into myriad substreams to explain the central phenomenon of evolution: Each species has ancestors in common with other species but is in the present day separate and distinct; traced far enough back, each can be related to all the others. Thus, the study of the DNA in human cells transmitted only from female ancestors, combined with fairly straightforward mathematics, leads to the conclusion that an "African Eve", one woman who lived some 200,000 years ago, is ancestral to all living humans. He looks at the roles of predation, cooperation, varying sex ratios, and other "strategies" that organisms develop to promote survival of their DNA. You can listen online to free English audiobook “River Out of Eden” by Richard Dawkins on our website.
