I’m thinking about ghosts as I drive to Oxford to interview Richard Dawkins, arguably the world’s most famous atheist, Darwinian and sparring public scientist. It’s a different atmosphere from when I spoke to him for the Listener two years ago ahead of his New Zealand tour. His latest book, The Genetic Book of the Dead: A Darwinian Reverie, was accompanied by a European and North American tour evocatively billed “The Final Bow”, lending a crepuscular quality to its launch. So, I was taken aback when I arrived at Dawkins’ labyrinthine apartment complex on the Oxford Canal and saw it overlooked a graveyard.
“How poetic,” I remark when I enter, referencing the title of his book. Dawkins smiles politely, but his expression suggests I move on. Fair enough.
Smaller and frailer than I remember – he’s about 176cm – Dawkins greets me outside his front door with a warm smile and impeccable manners, immediately taking my jacket and bag with an old-world courtesy and a nod to his past as an Oxford don. It’s a freezing day, and when I ask for a tissue to blow my nose, he pads off to the kitchen in socks, returning with two neatly torn pieces of kitchen roll. His in-person presence has been likened to a local parish vicar, and there’s something disarming in his gentleness. Yet beneath this exterior lies a sharp pen and a formidable interviewee.
Dawkins doesn’t shy away from silence; he holds it, like a tool, wielded with precision. When he doesn’t want to answer a question, he simply doesn’t – offering a single word and nothing more. I cringed through a recent podcast as an interviewer floundered for 10 minutes, stymied by Dawkins’ terse responses. But as soon as the conversation turns to science, or art, he lets his guard down; ideas flow as if on a current.
Playing it safe
The Genetic Book of the Dead was billed by The Guardian as a “swansong” and The Times as the equivalent of Dawkins’ “Greatest Hits”. For an author renowned for shaking up the status quo, the only complaint is that he’s playing it too safe. It’s essentially a tribute to Charles Darwin, the scientist Dawkins has spent his life looking up to and championing, and an ode to the beauty and oddities of evolution – from a snake with a dummy at the tip of its tail, to murderous cuckoos. But if you’re looking for the flash of provocation and innovation from Dawkins’ earlier work, you won’t find it here.
Dawkins’ debut book, The Selfish Gene, was first published nearly 50 years ago, and established him as the pre-eminent scientific communicator of his generation; much like his hero Darwin, who he describes as “a gentle scholar who was honest but struggled mightily to be understood”.
But 2006′s The God Delusion catapulted Dawkins into wider public consciousness. This polarising work made Dawkins one of the most famous atheists in the world, and public enemy No 1 among many Christians, particularly for his ability to fire off Shakespearean insults. He referred to the God of the Old Testament as a “filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully”.
In some ways, his 2019 book Outgrowing God was his last real cultural gut punch. He has since published books on well, books (Books Do Furnish a Life) and the evolution of flight.
For this interview, we sit next to each other on a large beige leather couch in his modest living room. An electronic wind instrument – which looks a bit like a large clarinet – rests on the coffee table. I wonder if Dawkins, now 83, has mellowed with age or simply stepped back from his role as a provocateur.
“I think the polemic aspect [of my work] has been exaggerated,” he says. Does he regret stepping into the culture wars?
“No, no, I don’t, because it’s very important and it impinges on science.” And you’re about truth? “Yes.”
I ask if it’s harder to be a public scientist in a climate where truth and fact appear to be relative. He mumbles a non-response. Does this bore him? “Well, you mentioned this idea that truth is relative, and truth is whatever you feel like. And that, I think, is antithetical to the scientific spirit.”
If The Selfish Gene proposed the concept of the “gene’s-eye view” of evolution, then The Genetic Book of the Dead is the gene looking back at its ancestral history. In it, Dawkins uses an analogy of a palimpsest – a manuscript that has been written on repeatedly, bearing traces of its earlier form. Historians and scientists often study these ancient manuscripts to uncover the very first scribblings and rewrites that paint a picture of past societies, environments and so on.
I wonder what Dawkins thinks of his own palimpsest. Does he have a view of his own legacy? “Well, I’m 83 now, so it’s natural to be sort of looking back in a way and thinking legacy … However, it’s not for me to say, really. I mean, I’ve got a corpus of books, which I’m quite pleased about,” he says with genuine modesty.
One thing that always moves me is the number of people who say I’ve changed their life.
Dawkins’ central thesis in the book is that current science can “read” each animal’s manuscript at the top layer, through their behavioural and physical characteristics – using an example of the horned lizard of the Mojave, with its sand-coloured environment painted on its back.
But he posits that scientists of the future will be able to stroll into a library and “download” an animal’s entire genetic history – from the very first genetic code, and all the modifications of the animal “learning” from the past, through to the present day. This means our future scientist would “see” the immune system’s memory of a past disease, and physiological changes such as adaptation to altitude, or even simulations of possible future outcomes. The effects of this would be game-changing, not just for evolutionary science, but also for our understanding of what ancient worlds looked like, and, crucially, what the past tells us about the future.
In the book, he often refers to the gains of future scientists, giving one of them the name “SOF”, and pauses in a distinctly awkward Dawkinsian manner to explain that, “In order to avoid ungainly pronoun constructions, and as a courtesy, I arbitrarily assume SOF to be female.”
As someone who has spent his life championing science, I wonder if it might be strange – or perhaps even a bit sad – for him to contemplate a future where scientific advancements continue without him to witness them. Dawkins seems unfazed and thinks it’s a thrilling time for young scientists – not just biologists, but all scientists – and points to the future when physicists may finally reconcile relativity with quantum theory. Personally, he says, he’d love to see the answer to the big unknown: discovering the very first genetic molecule – the spark that ignited life.
“It was probably not DNA. So how did that come into being?” He mentions the “fashionable” RNA world hypothesis – which suggests RNA, the molecule that gained attention with the Covid vaccine, might have played a pivotal role in igniting life. But the jury is still out on that, he says, as the evidence isn’t there yet. “It’s a very big question,” he adds with a smile.
A final bow
In his promotional video for The Final Bow: His Last Tour on the Road, accompanied by dramatic strings and the occasional thump of a beating drum, Dawkins declares, “The maxim ‘quit while you’re ahead’ has recently received a welcome boost, and I anticipate that this will be my last European and UK tour. My swansong. My final bow.”
However, reviews suggest this statement was not entirely accurate, and he’s working on another book. “It’s my last big American tour,” he admits, citing travel as a deciding factor. “I think it’s probably time to call it a day.”
His tour late last year coincided with the re-election of Donald Trump. “I was hopeful [about Kamala Harris winning]. But I can’t bear American elections. I simply can’t stand being in the same country as the electoral college.” Though he describes Trump as a “disaster”, he draws a contrast with Elon Musk, whom he has met and regards as intelligent.
The distinction may lie in a fundamental value for Dawkins: where Trump is an impulsive wheeler-dealer adept at evading evidence, Musk is a physicist known for his systematic approach to problem solving. It’s this quality Dawkins holds in high regard, because it aligns with his unwavering commitment to science.
New Zealand & evolution
If long-distance travel is no longer on the cards, it could be assumed that Dawkins’ New Zealand visit in 2023 was his last. He has long admired this country, even suggesting during the pandemic he might move there. However, this time, he was troubled by the “half a dozen” scientists who approached him, concerned about being censured by the Royal Society Te Apārangi or “threatened with expulsion” for their views on mātauranga Māori in the science curriculum.
Dawkins vehemently described the debate as “nonsense” and felt the audience largely supported him, even receiving cheers in response. Despite his strident views – he wrote a Spectator column calling the teaching of mātauranga in science classes “ludicrous” and “adolescent virtue signalling” – he believes New Zealand’s geographical isolation and unique ecosystem make it one of the richest places to study evolution.
One of the most intriguing sections of his new book explores animals “doubling back” in their evolutionary journey. To clarify, evolution never truly reverts; it simply adapts to the environment, like a palimpsest that has an old phrase written anew.
During our interview, Dawkins refers to the New Zealand lesser short-tailed bat, which has reverted to ground hunting, as an example. Some evidence even suggests ancient bats were grounded before evolving flight – illustrating this back-and-forth evolutionary journey. In the book, he uses an example of the modern land tortoise, which has made seemingly arduous amounts of reversals. The tortoise’s fish ancestors (and ours) left the sea 400 million years ago, and after a period on land returned to the water and became sea turtles. Some aquatic turtles came back to the land and became our modern dry-land tortoises. The same can be true of hippos – molecular gene sequencing reveals their common ancestor is not a pig, as Dawkins was taught as an undergraduate, but a whale, which was once a land mammal.
If animals can transition between land and water, what might this mean for humans? Could we, too, revert to the water if the climate changed dramatically?
“Well, that has been suggested, actually, by Alister Hardy, my old professor,” Dawkins says. “He thought humans went through an aquatic phase in prehistory. If you look at mammals like hippos, dugongs and whales, they’ve lost their hair and developed a layer of subcutaneous fat instead – because hair isn’t useful for insulation under water, but fat is.” He says the theory was taken up by Welsh author and television writer Elaine Morgan, who “became quite evangelical about it”, but adds most anthropologists don’t take it seriously as there isn’t much fossil evidence.
Arts appreciation
While Dawkins’ unwavering defence of science sometimes verges on the kind of fervour he critiques in religious fundamentalism, his deep appreciation for the arts offers a counterbalance. In his home, there’s a well-used piano in the corner, and his upcoming book is set to explore the life of artist and biologist Ernst Haeckel, often referred to as the “German Darwinian”. He’s quick to offer his favourite poet as WB Yeats – “I shouldn’t really, as he was a mystic.”
I ask him if there’s any space for mysticism in his world. “No. There’s no room for mysticism. There’s plenty of space for poetry and music, but I’m a materialist. That’s not a demeaning thing – I think the material world is utterly magical.”
Dawkins, naturally, doesn’t subscribe to the traditional concept of a soul but has acknowledged in earlier work that he could accept a definition as an “overwhelming sense of subjective personal identity”. Would a scientist of the future see an echo of an artist in Dawkins’ own genetic palimpsest? “No,” he replies matter of factly, “but I like to think I can paint with words.”
Reviews of his tour are quick to point out the surprising mix of generations at his live events – young and old, and while his recent years of sparring on X and clumsy forays into transgender issues will surely be part of his legacy, one can’t understate the profound effect Dawkins’ work has had on multiple generations of scientists and laypeople, and as an unwavering defender of science. Try to think of who might be waiting in the wings to take his place. There is no one; he’s his own unique species.
What will he miss about touring? “One thing that always moves me is the number of people who say I’ve changed their life. And many of them say they went into a life of science because of reading my books, which is very nice. I really love that.”
The Genetic Book of the Dead: A Darwinian Reverie, by Richard Dawkins (Bloomsbury, RRP $54), is on sale now. Main Image: Anthony Ellison