Who would be a man of sober facts in an age of strident feelings? A scientist dedicated to empirical proof at a time when “lived experience” now seems to trump objective evidence?
Richard Dawkins is just such a man. Bestselling author of The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion, he is both our foremost eminence gris in the field of evolutionary biology and our most famously vocal atheist.
He was brought up in Anglicanism but by his early teens had rejected its central tenets on the grounds of logic, truth and the laws of physics. But he is mellower than his youthful rebellion would suggest. “I sort of suspect that many who profess Anglicanism probably don’t believe any of it at all in any case but vaguely enjoy, as I do,” he admits. “I suppose I’m a cultural Anglican and I see evensong in a country church through much the same eyes as I see a village cricket match on the village green.”
At the age of 82, and about to fly to the US for a conference, he is also working on a new book (he has already written or edited more than 20) and could be forgiven for embracing a quiet, intellectual life in the sequestered groves of academe, far from the noisy passive-aggression of the gender wars. After all, research published by the Policy Institute at King’s College London earlier this year revealed just 32 per cent of British people consider themselves to be religious. Surely his job is done?
But Dawkins is not the retiring sort, in any sense. Quite the opposite; he is in combative mood having not only witnessed but experienced first-hand the thuggish tactics of the “paranoid, hypersensitive” transgender movement that flies in the face of science by insisting that sex is merely assigned at birth, that men can become women and demonises anyone who disagrees. “Is trans ideology becoming a religion? Well, it has some of the attributes,” muses the author of The God Delusion, which prompted uproar when it was published in 2006. “Of course, it’s not a religion in the sense of believing in the supernatural, but the zealous hunting down and punishing of heretics, that’s very like a religion. The Salem witch hunts do come to mind and there is something ruthless and unforgiving in the way people like Kathleen Stock are treated.”
Prof Stock is the leading academic who was threatened, harried and bullied out of her job for daring to voice the entirely mainstream view that trans women are not the same as biological women and therefore should not access female-only spaces or take part in women’s sports. Dawkins has spoken out on her behalf a number of times, but to be honest, she’s old news.
In downtown Salem, there’s an insatiable appetite for fresh sinners to torch; at present it’s the singer Roisin Murphy, who was first vilified on social media and then abruptly axed from the BBC’s Music 6 line-up (although the corporation begs to differ) after she described puberty blocker drugs as “absolutely desolate” and called for “little mixed-up kids” to be protected from Big Pharma.
Shocked by the backlash, she later apologised, but to no avail. It’s the modern way; excoriation followed by excommunication. Dawkins hasn’t heard of her, but then he is driven by principles rather than personalities.
“The worst aspect of the whole phenomenon is that if someone disagrees with you, they won’t engage in debate, instead they will brand you hateful, cancel you and sometimes destroy your career, by putting you in the virtual equivalent of the village stocks and hurling horrible things at you,” he says. “I don’t like, understand or endorse taking offence for its own sake. It’s childish. If an idea is silly, then, of course, I’m going to say so.”
Fighting talk. Believe it or not, calling someone “silly” can be construed as an existential attack. In the surreal, overwrought world of 2023, keyboard warriors routinely try to censor the academic who turned science into literature (how pleased CP Snow would be) and ushered in a new publishing genre aimed at “educated lay people”. And let’s be honest, who doesn’t fancy themselves as one of those?
They say you should never meet your heroes. I freely confess Dawkins has long been one of mine; back in 1976 two seismic events tilted my world on its axis. Thin Lizzy released The Boys Are Back in Town. And I read The Selfish Gene: “We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.” I was 10 years of age and it blew me away.
“What a precocious little girl you were!” he exclaims when I tell him. It sounds terribly rude. It isn’t meant to be. He is actually beaming with pleasure – the cognitive dissonance between the precise meaning of his words and their emotional interpretation neatly sums up what one might call The Dawkins Effect. It explains the mismatch between the man and the myth. Here he is, engaged and thoughtful company yet caricatured as a furious contrarian.
“I do find it quite frustrating to be portrayed as angry,” he says mildly. “I am just focused on clarity and on truth. I’m emphatic and perhaps that gets misconstrued as fury.”
Given his fearsome reputation, the polite, charismatic man who greets me at the door of his bright warehouse apartment on the fringes of Oxford, where he is an emeritus fellow of New Hall (having previously been the fabulously-monikered “professor for public understanding of science” at the university) is not at all what I expect. He is in his stockinged feet, dressed in a suit (although mercifully tieless), has the erect bearing of an army officer and is gracious to a fault – I can’t recall the last time any man opened a door for me.
I look around the charming open-plan sitting room furnished with books and quirky pieces of art. Some of his many awards are laid out on his baby grand piano. Curiously, they all appear to be made of clear glass. Maybe it’s a science thing; full transparency and all that.
“Do you live alone?” I ask with a deliberate hint of mischief as I know he has a partner, whom he fastidiously keeps below the radar. He shakes his head and although the gesture is small, it effectively conveys that his personal life is out of bounds.
When I quip that having no fewer than three ex-wives (one of whom includes Lalla Ward, an actress who played Romana in Doctor Who and was once married to Tom Baker) and a current girlfriend is surely the very essence of The Selfish Gene, I watch him narrow his eyes and steadfastly refuse to be in the least bit amused.
“Nobody has any interest in my private affairs,” he says crisply. I demur but as I don’t have any peer-reviewed evidence to offer him by way of backing up my assertion, I have no choice but to let it go. Eventually, he concedes he has a daughter, Juliet, who is a GP with a young son and expresses “great pleasure” in being a grandfather. What follows is less an interview and more of a free-wheeling conversation.
Another tedious old fart who thinks the world should be terribly interested in his insistence at being rude.
>Sadly, our time is up so I leave, clutching The Genetic Book of the Dead, my inner 10-year-old skipping with joy, my adult self grateful that eminent figures like Dawkins refuse to be silenced by the transgender vigilantes who would see the rights of the many subjugated to the sensibilities of the few.
Britain is not a serious country and journalism is not a serious profession.
Dawkins is a twat, film at 11. Nearly all of the “New Atheists” ended up being either far right or bigots.
Hard to disagree with most of that, there certainly is a religious element to it.
> In February of this year, what he calls “crackpot” North American evolutionary biologists called for a ban on certain terms for not being “inclusive” enough. They suggested labels such as male, female, man, woman, mother and father should be replaced by “sperm-producing” or “egg-producing” to avoid “emphasising heteronormative views”
Insane.
I would like to think the “sensibilities” of the many are “Maybe we shouldn’t be cunts to people for no good reasons”
Which directly flies in the face with his *current* opinions.
Cue shock and furious anger as he dares to question the latest puritanical scripture.
7 comments
Who would be a man of sober facts in an age of strident feelings? A scientist dedicated to empirical proof at a time when “lived experience” now seems to trump objective evidence?
Richard Dawkins is just such a man. Bestselling author of The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion, he is both our foremost eminence gris in the field of evolutionary biology and our most famously vocal atheist.
He was brought up in Anglicanism but by his early teens had rejected its central tenets on the grounds of logic, truth and the laws of physics. But he is mellower than his youthful rebellion would suggest. “I sort of suspect that many who profess Anglicanism probably don’t believe any of it at all in any case but vaguely enjoy, as I do,” he admits. “I suppose I’m a cultural Anglican and I see evensong in a country church through much the same eyes as I see a village cricket match on the village green.”
At the age of 82, and about to fly to the US for a conference, he is also working on a new book (he has already written or edited more than 20) and could be forgiven for embracing a quiet, intellectual life in the sequestered groves of academe, far from the noisy passive-aggression of the gender wars. After all, research published by the Policy Institute at King’s College London earlier this year revealed just 32 per cent of British people consider themselves to be religious. Surely his job is done?
But Dawkins is not the retiring sort, in any sense. Quite the opposite; he is in combative mood having not only witnessed but experienced first-hand the thuggish tactics of the “paranoid, hypersensitive” transgender movement that flies in the face of science by insisting that sex is merely assigned at birth, that men can become women and demonises anyone who disagrees. “Is trans ideology becoming a religion? Well, it has some of the attributes,” muses the author of The God Delusion, which prompted uproar when it was published in 2006. “Of course, it’s not a religion in the sense of believing in the supernatural, but the zealous hunting down and punishing of heretics, that’s very like a religion. The Salem witch hunts do come to mind and there is something ruthless and unforgiving in the way people like Kathleen Stock are treated.”
Prof Stock is the leading academic who was threatened, harried and bullied out of her job for daring to voice the entirely mainstream view that trans women are not the same as biological women and therefore should not access female-only spaces or take part in women’s sports. Dawkins has spoken out on her behalf a number of times, but to be honest, she’s old news.
In downtown Salem, there’s an insatiable appetite for fresh sinners to torch; at present it’s the singer Roisin Murphy, who was first vilified on social media and then abruptly axed from the BBC’s Music 6 line-up (although the corporation begs to differ) after she described puberty blocker drugs as “absolutely desolate” and called for “little mixed-up kids” to be protected from Big Pharma.
Shocked by the backlash, she later apologised, but to no avail. It’s the modern way; excoriation followed by excommunication. Dawkins hasn’t heard of her, but then he is driven by principles rather than personalities.
“The worst aspect of the whole phenomenon is that if someone disagrees with you, they won’t engage in debate, instead they will brand you hateful, cancel you and sometimes destroy your career, by putting you in the virtual equivalent of the village stocks and hurling horrible things at you,” he says. “I don’t like, understand or endorse taking offence for its own sake. It’s childish. If an idea is silly, then, of course, I’m going to say so.”
Fighting talk. Believe it or not, calling someone “silly” can be construed as an existential attack. In the surreal, overwrought world of 2023, keyboard warriors routinely try to censor the academic who turned science into literature (how pleased CP Snow would be) and ushered in a new publishing genre aimed at “educated lay people”. And let’s be honest, who doesn’t fancy themselves as one of those?
They say you should never meet your heroes. I freely confess Dawkins has long been one of mine; back in 1976 two seismic events tilted my world on its axis. Thin Lizzy released The Boys Are Back in Town. And I read The Selfish Gene: “We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.” I was 10 years of age and it blew me away.
“What a precocious little girl you were!” he exclaims when I tell him. It sounds terribly rude. It isn’t meant to be. He is actually beaming with pleasure – the cognitive dissonance between the precise meaning of his words and their emotional interpretation neatly sums up what one might call The Dawkins Effect. It explains the mismatch between the man and the myth. Here he is, engaged and thoughtful company yet caricatured as a furious contrarian.
“I do find it quite frustrating to be portrayed as angry,” he says mildly. “I am just focused on clarity and on truth. I’m emphatic and perhaps that gets misconstrued as fury.”
Given his fearsome reputation, the polite, charismatic man who greets me at the door of his bright warehouse apartment on the fringes of Oxford, where he is an emeritus fellow of New Hall (having previously been the fabulously-monikered “professor for public understanding of science” at the university) is not at all what I expect. He is in his stockinged feet, dressed in a suit (although mercifully tieless), has the erect bearing of an army officer and is gracious to a fault – I can’t recall the last time any man opened a door for me.
I look around the charming open-plan sitting room furnished with books and quirky pieces of art. Some of his many awards are laid out on his baby grand piano. Curiously, they all appear to be made of clear glass. Maybe it’s a science thing; full transparency and all that.
“Do you live alone?” I ask with a deliberate hint of mischief as I know he has a partner, whom he fastidiously keeps below the radar. He shakes his head and although the gesture is small, it effectively conveys that his personal life is out of bounds.
When I quip that having no fewer than three ex-wives (one of whom includes Lalla Ward, an actress who played Romana in Doctor Who and was once married to Tom Baker) and a current girlfriend is surely the very essence of The Selfish Gene, I watch him narrow his eyes and steadfastly refuse to be in the least bit amused.
“Nobody has any interest in my private affairs,” he says crisply. I demur but as I don’t have any peer-reviewed evidence to offer him by way of backing up my assertion, I have no choice but to let it go. Eventually, he concedes he has a daughter, Juliet, who is a GP with a young son and expresses “great pleasure” in being a grandfather. What follows is less an interview and more of a free-wheeling conversation.
Another tedious old fart who thinks the world should be terribly interested in his insistence at being rude.
>Sadly, our time is up so I leave, clutching The Genetic Book of the Dead, my inner 10-year-old skipping with joy, my adult self grateful that eminent figures like Dawkins refuse to be silenced by the transgender vigilantes who would see the rights of the many subjugated to the sensibilities of the few.
Britain is not a serious country and journalism is not a serious profession.
Dawkins is a twat, film at 11. Nearly all of the “New Atheists” ended up being either far right or bigots.
Hard to disagree with most of that, there certainly is a religious element to it.
> In February of this year, what he calls “crackpot” North American evolutionary biologists called for a ban on certain terms for not being “inclusive” enough. They suggested labels such as male, female, man, woman, mother and father should be replaced by “sperm-producing” or “egg-producing” to avoid “emphasising heteronormative views”
Insane.
I would like to think the “sensibilities” of the many are “Maybe we shouldn’t be cunts to people for no good reasons”
Which directly flies in the face with his *current* opinions.
Cue shock and furious anger as he dares to question the latest puritanical scripture.