Coordinates: 51°57′00″N 1°29′28″W / 51.950°N 1.491°W / 51.950; -1.491

Heythrop is a village and civil parish just over 2 miles (3.2 km) east of Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire. The parish includes the hamlet of Dunthrop.

Heythrop had a Norman parish church of Saint Nicholas, but the nave has been demolished and only the chancel has been preserved as a mortuary chapel. The chapel's west doorway was the south doorway of the former nave.

In 1657 an attempt to merge the Benefices of Enstone and Heythrop was abandoned in the face of local opposition. In 1923 the incumbent of Heythrop ceased to live in the parish and in 1964 it and Enstone were finally merged. In 2001 the Benefice of Enstone and Heythrop merged with that of Ascott-under-Wychwood, Chadlington, and Spelsbury to form the Chase Benefice.

Heythrop House in Heythrop Park was built from 1706 onwards by the architect Thomas Archer for Charles Talbot, 1st Duke of Shrewsbury. It was gutted by fire in 1831 and restored by the architect Alfred Waterhouse in 1871 for Albert Brassey. It was a Jesuit college from 1922 until 1969 and a training college for the National Westminster Bank from 1969 until 1999.

Clinton Richard Dawkins, FRS, FRSL (born 26 March 1941), known as Richard Dawkins, is a British 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 came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which popularised the gene-centered view of evolution and introduced the term meme. In 1982 he introduced an influential concept into evolutionary biology, presented in his book The Extended Phenotype, that the phenotypic effects of a gene are not necessarily limited to an organism's body, but can stretch far into the environment, including the bodies of other organisms.

Dawkins is an atheist, a vice president of the British Humanist Association, and a supporter of the Brights movement. He is well known for his criticism of creationism and intelligent design. In his 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker, he argued against the watchmaker analogy, an argument for the existence of a supernatural creator based upon the complexity of living organisms. Instead, he described evolutionary processes as analogous to a blind watchmaker. He has since written several popular science books, and makes regular television and radio appearances, predominantly discussing these topics. In his 2006 book The God Delusion, Dawkins contends that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that religious faith is a delusion—"a fixed false belief." As of January 2010 the English-language version has sold more than two million copies and had been translated into 31 languages.