March 9 is the 68th day of the year (69th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 297 days remaining until the end of the year.

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.

Ian Clayton (born 4 September 1959 in Featherstone, Yorkshire) is a British writer and broadcaster. In a freelance career spanning 20 years he has edited and authored more than forty books and broadcast on TV and radio. As an animator, Ian has run education workshops from infant schools to universities, working regularly with musicians on opera and music theatre projects. He has worked across Europe as well as the United States.

Clayton has worked with Yorkshire Art Circus for twenty five years. He currently presents a documentary series for Yorkshire Television called My Yorkshire and is a regular radio broadcaster and workshop leader for numerous cultural institutions.

In April, 2006 Clayton's nine-year-old daughter Billie died in a canoeing accident in Powys, Wales in which her father and twin brother Edward survived. Following an inquest into her death in 2008 - which recorded a verdict of misadventure - Clayton criticised the canoe hire industry and called for it to be more strictly regulated.

Kaitlyn Ashley Maher (born January 10, 2004) is an American child singer and actress born in Michigan, and raised in Ashburn, Virginia. In 2008 people discovered the young star at the age of 4 on season three of America's Got Talent singing Somewhere Out There. In 2008, she reached the final ten on the third series of television talent show America's Got Talent; the youngest person to do so. Maher has since appeared live at The Great Kids Expo in Chantilly, Virginia, on October 25, 2008, a live broadcast of the 2008 lighting of the National Christmas Tree, on December 4, 2008 attended by President George W. Bush and over 7,000 guests, and the 2009 Cherry Blossom Festival on April 11, 2009. On October 3, 2009, Maher was the opening act of The Addi and Cassi Hempel Fund benefit. Maher has appeared in a Harris Teeter commercial airing during December 2008. She was also selected by Compassion International as its first ever Child Ambassador; visited children in El Salvador with Compassion, got to meet her sponsored child, and shot a music video to her title song "You Were Meant to Be."

Joseph Raymond "Joe" McCarthy (November 14, 1908 – May 2, 1957) was an American politician who served as a Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 until his death in 1957. Beginning in 1950, McCarthy became the most visible public face of a period in which Cold War tensions fueled fears of widespread Communist subversion. He was noted for making claims that there were large numbers of Communists and Soviet spies and sympathizers inside the United States federal government and elsewhere. Ultimately, McCarthy's tactics and his inability to substantiate his claims led him to be censured by the United States Senate.

The term McCarthyism, coined in 1950 in reference to McCarthy's practices, was soon applied to similar anti-communist activities. Today the term is used more generally in reference to demagogic, reckless, and unsubstantiated accusations, as well as public attacks on the character and/or patriotism of political opponents.

Born and raised on a Wisconsin farm, McCarthy earned a law degree at Marquette University in 1935 and was elected as a circuit judge in 1939, the youngest in state history. At age 33, McCarthy volunteered for the United States Marine Corps and served during World War II. He successfully ran for the United States Senate in 1946, defeating Robert M. La Follette, Jr. After three largely undistinguished years in the Senate, McCarthy rose suddenly to national fame in February 1950 when he asserted in a speech that he had a list of "members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring" who were employed in the State Department. McCarthy was never able to prove his sensational charge.