> Dawkins never had much of a research career.

Perhaps not, but I have found his popular books like The Selfish Gene and The Ancestor's Tale very informative.

Unfortunately, when he ventures outside the domain of his professional expertise, he doesn't do as well. For example, in The God Delusion, which is basically a book-length diatribe against orthodox religious belief, he comes out at one point with this:

Let me sum up Einsteinian religion in one more quotation from Einstein himself: “To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious.”

If we grant for the sake of argument that typical orthodox religious cant is BS, this is just as much BS. The phrase "let him who is without sin cast the first stone" comes to mind.