I was already a disbeliever when I read "The Selfish Gene" but the younger Dawkin's arguments in that book, many dozens of explanations of why various animals and plants are the way they are and how they got that way, were so compelling and self-evident that any doubt I might have still had was erased. And the The Extended Phenotype, A Blind Watchmaker, The God Delusion, all just gave more and more material from zoology that continued to fall in line with the theory of natural selection so well that it was undoubtably true. Sure, I went back and read the Origin of Species too. Once you accept slow random mutation and the environment killing off the unsuited (defined by whatever the environment happens to kill), the theory is self-evident: evolution MUST happen. Dawkin's insight (in contrast to Gould) was that it wasn't the species being selected, or the individual, but the gene, and a lot of examples show how that works out.
The older Dawkin's who debates believers isn't really interesting to me.
I haven't read Nietzsche either (I can't read German, and even the translations are difficult) but I've read enough about what people say of his writings to get some of the gist. I should probably just read him.
