His books sell in their millions, his TV programmes are rapturously received, and he’s appeared in Doctor Who. Not bad for a 67-year-old academic. Now Richard Dawkins, scourge of creationists, is championing his Victorian hero
Richard Dawkins is that rare specimen, a public intellectual, a knight of the mind who goes into battle against the ignorance and foolhardiness of the populace. Unlike the French, who worship their public intellectuals, giving them pet names such as les intellos, and airing them regularly on serious television and in print, the British like to shove academics into a musty corner, or laugh at them. This was not always the case: the Victorians, with their public lectures and royal societies, gloried in debate and celebrated the thrills of fresh knowledge. The nearest we get to this now is celebrating the thrill of Germaine Greer walking out of Celebrity Big Brother.
The marginalisation of academia is partly self-created by its pomp and obfuscatory language. Dawkins broke out of the ghetto long ago thanks not just to an extraordinary mind, but to a gift for elegant communication and controversy: the English-language version of his recent paean to atheism, The God Delusion, has sold 1.5million copies (it has been translated into 31 other languages). He is big in airport bookshops. In 1976, when his first book, The Selfish Gene, was published, The New York Times explained the mind-expanding pleasure of his science-lit as “the sort of popular science writing that makes the reader feel like a genius”.
In these barren, thoughtless times, Dawkins gives people something substantial to chew on. His audience is surprisingly grateful, and also relieved to see someone slapping creationists about and tossing them into the primordial soup, as well as explaining atheism positively. Before I went to interview him about his new three-part television series, Dawkins on Darwin, various over-excited friends offered to accompany me and texted questions for me to ask him; signed copies were requested of The God Delusion, which one Iranian exile said he had recently found himself reading as his plane landed – everyone else was clutching the Koran.
The Darwin-Dawkins combo was of some fascination too; one acquaintance lent me her much-loved copy of On the Origin of Species. “The language is beautiful. I read it for a Victorian literature course, not science,” she said. And that, perhaps, is one of the reasons for the strong connection between Dawkins and Darwin. “Every line of Darwin, you know he really wanted to be understood,” says Dawkins. “There was no pretentious showing off about him.”
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