He was the poster boy for militant atheism but has cancel culture finally clipped his wings? Britain's Darwinist-in-chief on self-censorship, the gender wars and why he loves Elon Musk.
There's not much that frightens Richard Dawkins. He shrugs off his regular hate mail from angry evangelicals, occasionally taking to YouTube to read it aloud. He has never backed down from his withering criticisms of Islamic fundamentalism, despite the potential for blowback. He's happy to pick intellectual fights with eminent fellow scientists and has even been known to find fault (hard to imagine, I realise) with the odd journalist or two.
But Dawkins tells me there are two things he does fear: one is being cancelled by the left. The other is hang-gliding. I think he's probably in more danger from the former.
We've met to talk about flying, though, in all its forms. Dawkins has just published a book — his second this year — titled Flights of Fancy, about the miracle of flight, from pterodactyls to birds to helicopters and space rockets. Dawkins was certainly a prolific lockdowner: on top of his two published books (the other was a collection of essays in praise of science), he began and then discarded a novel about humans bringing back Homo erectus, our ancient ancestor. He spent the time with his new partner, who he doesn't name, having split up amicably from his third wife, Lalla Ward, in 2016. He admits to having "rather enjoyed" lockdown and is pleased with the timely "shot in the arm" (pun intended) it has given his field, showing us that science can "pull a rabbit out of a hat" when it needs to.
Yet it is flight that has really caught his imagination. How did birds evolve to fly? Why are humans so intent on copying them? And where might we fly to next? These are the questions that have been exercising the biologist of late. Indeed, he often finds himself admiring birds and thinking "what fun it would be" to defy gravity and join them. Which leads us to hang-gliding: he's fascinated by it.
"It must be a wonderful feeling, rather like being a bird or a pterodactyl," he muses. "The wings become almost a part of your body. You get to feel every nuance, the eddies of the wind, like a bird." So why not give it a try? "Cowardice," he admits. "I can't stand on the edge of a cliff. I have to get on my hands and knees."
Vertigo can happen to anyone, however: I'm more curious about his fear of cancellation. Because love him or loathe him, Dawkins is a giant, the most famous living proponent of atheism. He's also quite possibly the most famous living scientist in Britain, and certainly our most prominent Darwinist. Over the past 45 years he has published 17 books (and is "pretty pleased with all of them"), including bestsellers such as The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion. He invented the word "meme", for heaven's sake, which he originally described as an idea or behaviour that spreads from person to person within a culture.
We meet in New College's Enthoven room, surrounded by bookish grandeur, the scholarly peace disrupted only by the familiar peal of church bells. With his distinguished white mane and formidable bushy eyebrows, the 80-year-old Dawkins embodies a kind of high Oxford of the imagination. I've rarely seen anyone more attuned to their environment, as though he's been carved out of the quadrangle's venerable oak tree.
His considerable reputation as an evolutionary biologist, atheist and intellectual was forged in the hot cauldron of public debate. With forceful clarity and occasional rattiness, he has for decades gone about slaughtering sacred cows like a bloodthirsty butcher. So if Dawkins is now afraid to speak his mind, I'm not sure where that leaves the rest of us. "I self-censor," he admits. "More so in recent years." Why? "It's not a thing I've done throughout my life, I've always spoken my mind openly. But we're now in a time when if you do speak your mind openly, you are at risk of being picked up and condemned."
Dawkins is worried that the illiberalism of the left is helping to fuel right-wing populism, driving continued support to Donald Trump and the like. "Every time a lecturer is cancelled from an American university, that's another God knows how many votes for Trump," he says. He finds it particularly bothersome when his "own team" attacks him. "I'm much more hurt by attacks from the left," he says. "When I get hate mail from my own people, that hurts in a way that getting it from creationists doesn't." It must have hit home then when Dawkins had his 1996 Humanist of the Year award withdrawn by the American Humanist Association (AHA) earlier this year.
The AHA bestows this prestigious annual award to an admired humanist: recipients have included Margaret Atwood and Salman Rushdie. It lists them all on its website, but if you scroll down to 1996, Dawkins's name has been scrubbed. He's gone. Why? Because of a tweet. Back in April, Dawkins caused offence when he wondered why identifying across racial barriers is so much more difficult than across sexual barriers. He wrote: "In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP [The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People], was vilified for identifying as Black. Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as. Discuss."
He points out now that he was merely highlighting an interesting point for discussion, not taking a position. So will Dawkins put his money where his mouth is on this debate? Does he choose free speech or self-censorship?
He opts for free speech. "Race is very much a spectrum," he says. "Most African-Americans are mixed race, so there really is a spectrum. Somebody who looks white may even call themselves black, may have a very slight [inheritance]. People who have one great-grandparent who is Native American may call themselves Native American. Sex on the other hand is pretty damn binary. So on the face of it, it would seem easier for someone to identify as whatever race they choose. If you have one black parent and one white parent, you might think you could choose what to identify as."
Race, in Dawkins's view, is much more of a human construct than sex. "Whenever I'm asked to fill in a form asking what race I am, I just put 'human'," he says. He clearly feels a bit on edge talking about all this, perhaps realising that, by the standards of the chattering undergrads out there in the quad, his views make him resemble one of his beloved pterodactyls. He points suggestively at his copy of the book on the table. And yes, we will come back to that. But first I want to know what this famous biologist really thinks about sex and gender, one of the great debates of our time.
He recalls reading the historian Jan Morris's 1974 book Conundrum on transitioning to become a woman. "She felt herself to be a woman trapped in a man's body," Dawkins says. "I think that's a real phenomenon. I have sympathy. But when trans people insist that you say she is a woman, you redefine something. If you define a woman as a human with an XX karyotype, then she's not a woman. If you define a woman as someone who identifies as a woman, feels they are a woman and has maybe had an operation, then by that definition she is a woman. From a scientific point of view, she's not a woman. From a personal point of view, she is."
As a matter of "personal politeness" then, he's happy to use whatever pronouns people ask him to use. "But I don't like the idea that people can pillory someone like Jordan Peterson for refusing to be compelled to change his language," he says. In this Dawkins senses something he doesn't like: a quasi-religious faith that cannot be opposed. Or as he puts it: "Denying reality and it's a heresy to do anything other than that."
I'm starting to think he isn't quite so scared of speaking his mind after all. I remind him of another controversy from 2014, when he told a woman she should "abort it and try again" if she had a foetus diagnosed with Down's syndrome. "I don't know why it causes such a fuss," he says. "In western Europe, if you are diagnosed with a Down's baby, just about everybody has it aborted. They think I was saying you should kill your child, but it's nothing to do with that. The decision whether to bring the child into the world is very, very different to deciding whether to kill it once it's born."
Eventually I ease away from the hot button issues by making a confession: Richard Dawkins changed my life. I was one of those people who found salvation in The God Delusion, his 2006 mega-bestseller. As a child I was sent to learn with rabbis and became committed to practising Orthodox Judaism, but by my late teens I found myself confused and uncertain, searching for a path away from a religious faith that felt increasingly suffocating. I knew I wanted out, but I didn't have the words or arguments to get there. Then I read The God Delusion and that was that. To my adolescent mind, the clarity of Dawkins's prose and force of his argument were like rainfall after a drought.
"That's the best thing I've heard for a long time," he says. "That's terrific." To this day I find the uncompromising way he talks about religion rather fortifying. Dawkins's hostility to faith is primarily a scientific one. "It fundamentally attempts to undercut my entire world view, how the laws of physics have given rise to us," he says. "And it is wrong." But his other objection is moral. He views the wrath of the Old Testament as an "appalling moral lesson"; even worse is the "dreadful" New Testament: "The central message is that we are all born in Adam's sin, no matter what we have done, and we needed Jesus to be killed and tortured to save us. What a horrible idea. The idea that God couldn't think of a better way to forgive our sins than to have his son tortured and crucified."
And then of course you have Islam. Is he an Islamophobe, as has often been claimed? "I am not Islamophobic, I suppose I'm religiophobic," he says. "But I'm phobic about female genital mutilation, I'm phobic about throwing gay people off buildings, the joylessness that pervades the caliphate of Isis and the Afghanistan of the Taliban. I'm phobic about all those things. It doesn't make me Islamophobic and above all it doesn't make me Muslimophobic, because I think that Muslims are the greatest victims of the bad aspects of Islam."
The strike against Dawkins has long been that his atheism can be too militant. The "new atheist" movement that came to prominence in the mid-Noughties poured scorn on faith of all stripes. It was led by the "four horsemen": Dawkins alongside the philosophers Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett and the journalist Christopher Hitchens. But should they have offered more carrot with their stick? Was the militancy critique fair?
"Yes, I think it probably was," he says. "I'm not much of a politician. It might have been more politic to seduce the reader rather than attempt to persuade. To meet them halfway and say, 'I understand where you're coming from.' I suppose that hasn't been my way." People, he reflects, "don't wish to be told they're an idiot". He ponders for a moment. "But I think I don't mind being told I'm an idiot, if I am."
Yet Dawkins today seems a little mellower than his public reputation would have you believe, happy to contemplate the past as well as argue about the present. "When I think of being near the end of life, I am very pleased to have achieved the books that I have," he says. "I kind of feel like my life hasn't been wasted because of that."
Born in Nairobi and brought up in Nyasaland (now Malawi) before being sent to boarding school in England, Dawkins belonged to the last generation of imperial children, raised with cooks, servants, genteel Anglicanism and vast horizons. "My life as a young child was an anachronism, really," he says. "The attitude of the adults I grew up with was patronising and paternalistic towards Africans. They were never cruel, but they treated them rather like children." Beyond Empire, there are other embers of the Victorian age still glowing in Dawkins: his scientific zeal, his obsession with natural discovery and profound commitment to Darwin's theory of natural selection, which is as close as Dawkins has to a religious faith.
It is this curiosity, which he describes as his "appetite for wonder", that has driven Dawkins's long scientific endeavour, and drives it still. Eight decades into life, he is still marvelling at his own existence: "It's utterly bizarre that on a rocky planet, where nothing very much is happening, a spark, the origin of the first self-replicating entity, exploded. The replication bomb happened here and ultimately gave rise to trees and dinosaurs and us. How could you be so blind as to not be inspired by the fact of your own existence? It happened on maybe only this planet in the whole universe."
Does he think we're alone in the universe then? Probably not. "The statistical argument that tells us there almost certainly is life elsewhere, at the same time tells us the universe is so big, these little isolated replication bombs may never encounter each other. They never meet each other. They all think they're alone."
And yet we'll no doubt continue launching ourselves into the cosmos for signs of company. Which brings us back to flight. Dawkins sees a parallel between the way science has inspired him to look beyond the mundane, allowing his imagination to roam free, and the human longing to soar like the birds. He describes this, using a phrase coined by John Wyndham, as "the outward urge": the drive that propels so much human endeavour.
This is why he dedicated Flights of Fancy to the space pioneer Elon Musk, whom he describes as the "Columbus of our age". The pair became friendly when Musk expressed admiration for Dawkins and offered him a lift to Toronto on his private jet. At the time Dawkins was a little sceptical about electric cars. Now he "loves" his Tesla. He views Musk's ambition to land humans on Mars as more than just an ego trip: it may also have an important evolutionary purpose, to act as a back-up in case life on Earth is somehow destroyed.
Dawkins's own outward urge is still propelling him towards fresh discovery. He's in the middle of another tome, The Genetic Book of the Dead, which will examine how the attributes of animals — skin colour, hairiness, shape — can tell us a huge amount about the environments from which they evolved.
Yet for all their wisdom, Dawkins believes his tribe — scientists — must remain humble about their own ignorance. "It's important to state what we don't know," he says. "We know that evolution is true, just as we know the Earth orbits the sun. But we don't know what dark matter is, we don't know how the universe started and how life started. We don't understand consciousness. We mustn't fall into the trap of being seen as arrogant because we think we know everything. We're working on it."
Dawkins may have fallen into this trap once or twice over a long and sometimes scrappy life in the spotlight. He may have even fallen into it again during our interview. But arrogant or not, he remains an extraordinary public scientist. He changed my life and those of countless others for the better, allowing us to fly free from the gravity of ancient superstitions. He has made Darwinism cooler than it has any right to be. He's certainly correct that he is not an adept politician. But it seems to me that long after the politics of the moment are forgotten, when we've all moved on to the next battles and schisms, one thing that will remain with us is Richard Dawkins's insatiable appetite for wonder.
Flights of Fancy: Defying Gravity by Design and Evolution by Richard Dawkins, illustrated by Jana Lenzova, is published on November 11.
Written by: Josh Glancy
© The Times of London