Men are
supposed to mellow in their mid-60s. Richard Dawkins
appears to be going the other way. Never one to
tolerate fools at the best of times, he's become
noticeably less patient as the years roll by. "It
does appear that I've become rather more grumpy," he
says, without appearing that bothered one way or
another. And despite a contented home life with his
third wife, the actor Lalla Ward, there's a great
deal to be grumpy about.
Back in 1976, as a 30-something research fellow
recently returned to Oxford after the obligatory
two-year stint in the US at the University of
California at Berkeley, Dawkins secured his
reputation with The Selfish Gene as a cutting-edge
thinker and a man blessed with the common touch.
Long before popularising science became a career
route for academics, Dawkins managed to advance the
scientific understanding of the evolutionary
process, while making that knowledge accessible to
the general reader.
There were
two key parts to The Selfish Gene. The first was
Dawkins's inversion of the process of natural
selection. Instead of trotting out the established
view that organisms use genes to self-replicate,
Dawkins made the revolutionary suggestion that genes
use organisms to propagate themselves, an idea that
immediately answered many of the difficult questions
of Darwinism, such as the apparent selflessness of
some animal behaviour. The second important theme
was the rehabilitation of memes, self-replicating
cultural transmissions - "viruses of the mind" -
that are passed on both vertically and horizontally
within families. And it is the meme, or rather one
particular meme, that is the prime cause of
Dawkins's current grumpiness.
According to
memetic theory, memes are subject to the same
process of natural selection as genes. And yet one
meme, the religious meme, steadfastly refuses to
die. You can see where the religious meme sprung
from: when the world was an inexplicable and scary
place, a belief in the supernatural was both
comforting and socially adhesive. But as our
understanding of the world grew, you might have
expected the religious meme to give way to
rationalism. Yet the opposite has happened. Despite
overwhelming scientific evidence for the Darwinian
explanation of evolution, religious belief - and
fundamentalist religion at that - remains as
ingrained as ever.
Religion
offends every bone in Dawkins's rational, atheist
body. "You can see why people may want to believe in
something," he acknowledges. "The idea of an
afterlife where you can be reunited with loved ones
can be immensely consoling - though not to me. But
to maintain such a belief in the face of all the
evidence to the contrary is truly bewildering." If
individual faith is, for Dawkins, an expression of
an ignorance, collective faith and organised
religion embody something much more pernicious. That
is what drove him to make two films for Channel 4,
the first of which was shown last night, and to
write his new book, The God Delusion, to be
published in September.
Dawkins
describes these projects as "consciousness-raising
exercises" but the films come across as full-frontal
assaults. Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism and
Islam all get both barrels. Powerful and
well-argued, they are; subtle, they ain't. Richard
Harries, Bishop of Oxford, gets a walk-on role as
the liberal voice of religion, but mostly it's the
fundamentalists of all faiths who fall under
Dawkins's scrutiny. "They are profoundly wrong," he
says, "but in some ways I have more sympathy with
their views than I do with the so-called more
liberal wings. At least the fundamentalists haven't
tried to dilute their message. Their faith is
exposed for what it is for all to see."
No such
thing
What angers
Dawkins most is the way religion gets such an easy
ride. "We treat it with a politically correct
reverence that we don't accord to any other
institution," he says. "Even secularists talk about
Jewish, Catholic and Muslim children. There's no
such thing. Children aren't born with a particular
religious gene. What they are is children of Jewish,
Catholic and Muslim parents. If you started to talk
about monetarist or Marxist children, everyone would
consider you abusive. Yet for religion we make an
exception. We are incapable of distinguishing
between race and religion. There is some statistical
correlation between the two, but they are very
different entities and we shouldn't allow them to be
confused."
Predictably,
Dawkins has no time for faith schools. "Segregation
has no place in the education system," he argues.
"Take Northern Ireland. You could get rid of the
climate of hostility within a generation by getting
rid of segregated schooling. Separating Catholics
and Protestants has fomented centuries of
hostility." But Dawkins reserves his greatest scorn
for creationists. "How any government could promote
the Vardy academies in the north-east of England is
absolutely beyond me. Tony Blair defends them on
grounds of diversity, but it should be unthinkable
in the 21st century to have a school whose head of
science believes the world is less than 10,000 years
old."
Evolution
offers Dawkins all the explanations he needs - "if
there are other worlds elsewhere in the universe, I
would conjecture they are governed by the same laws
of natural selection" - but he does acknowledge
there are still large gaps in our knowledge. "Of
course, we would love to know more about the exact
moment of Big Bang," he says, "but interposing an
outside intelligence does nothing to add to that
knowledge, as we still know nothing about the
creation of that intelligence."
Unfortunately for Dawkins, it is into precisely
these gaps that faith and superstition insinuate
themselves, a problem made worse for secularists
when scientists declare a religious affiliation. "I
think the figures are somewhat overstated in this
country," he says tersely, "as it's generally the
same three scientists making their voices heard.
Most scientists use the term God in the way that
Einstein did, as an expression of reverence for the
deep mysteries of the universe, a sentiment I share.
"In the US,
the picture is rather different. Coming out as an
atheist can cost an academic his or her job in some
parts of America, and many choose to keep quiet
about their atheism. In a recent survey, 40% of US
scientists said they believed in God; however, when
the sample was narrowed to those in the National
Academy [the US equivalent of the Royal Society] the
figure was down to 10%."
He didn't
start out as an unbeliever. Dawkins was born into a
middle-class family that went to church each
Christmas. At school, Anglicanism, if not rammed
down the throat, was at least a given. "I had my
first doubts when I was nine," he recalls, "when I
realised there were lots of different religions and
they couldn't all be right. However I put my
misgivings on hold when I went to Oundle and got
confirmed. I only stopped believing when I was about
15."
Opponents
have claimed that Dawkins offers a bleak view of
humanity, something he categorically denies. "The
chances of each of us coming into existence are
infinitesimally small," he argues, "and even though
we shall all die some day, we should count ourselves
fantastically lucky to get our decades in the sun."
But even he expresses regret at our long-term
prospects. "Within 50 million years, it's highly
unlikely humans will still be around and it is sad
to think of the loss of all that knowledge and
music."
Greatest
skill
Dawkins's
greatest skill has been to synthesise other people's
material and come up with different ways of thinking
about problems that revolutionise future research.
But to write him off as an ideas man, pure and
simple, is to lose sight of the man. He may not do
any white-coat lab work these days but he can
number-crunch with the best of them. In person, he's
friendly rather than approachable, and there's a
hint of distance that suggests someone more at home
in front of a computer than with other people.
"I did used
to be addicted to computer programming," he admits.
"In the early days, there was no off-the-shelf
software and I wrote everything, from my own
word-processing programmes to more complex
programmes simulating cricket sounds that were
necessary for my research. However, I now view
programming as a vice, so I don't allow myself to do
it."
This split
between the nerd and the populist has been evident
all through his career. The nerd may have been more
in evidence early on - not least when he was doing
his doctorate and ignored the advice of his Nobel
prize-winning supervisor, Nikolaas Tinbergen, and
opted for a stats fest, "a classic piece of
Popperian science", instead of a fluffier study of
animal behaviour - but it's still around. Though
Dawkins has held the Charles Simonyi Chair in the
Public Understanding of Science at Oxford since 1995
and gets more attention than most other scientists,
you sense there's still a part of him that's not
altogether comfortable in the public gaze.
It seems
self-evident that his recent work has become more
polemical, though he becomes strangely reticent when
you suggest he's now a political figure as much as a
scientist. "I don't know about that," he says. "I
wouldn't want to make those claims." But then he
adds that he wishes more scientists would stand up
to be counted in the public arena.
There are
similar competing pulls elsewhere. After declaring
himself a recently converted anti-monarchist and
delivering a withering attack on Prince Charles -
"he's clearly soft on religion, just as he is on
every dopey, half-baked failure to think" - he pulls
back, saying he has nothing against Prince Charles
as a person and giving the thumbs up to the Queen.
Even so, no
one's ever going to die wondering what Dawkins
really thinks. He may agonise over the thinking
process and worry about how his ideas are
interpreted, but the real voice always emerges in
the end. Perhaps it is the populariser's dilemma:
you get remembered for the soundbite rather than the
complexity.
Put on the
spot, Dawkins reveals he believes his lasting
contribution to science is his 1984 book, The
Extended Phenotype. Most lay people have long since
forgotten or never heard of the book in which he
argued that genes extend beyond their physical
organisms - think beavers' dams and birds' nests -
to ensure their survival.
But
phenotypes have to remain on hold for the time being
as it's religion that Dawkins has in his sights for
the forseeable future. And what if, by some
mischance, he were to find there is a God when he
dies? He looks at me as if I were mad. "The question
is so preposterous that I can hardly grace it with a
hypothetical answer," he says finally. "But, to
quote Bertrand Russell, I suspect I would say,
'There's not enough evidence, God'."
