Richard Dawkins |
By Michael Powell, The New York Times, September 19, 2011
OXFORD, England
—You walk out of a soft-falling rain into the living room of an Oxford don,
with great walls of books, handsome art and, on the far side of the room,
graceful windows onto a luxuriant garden.
Does this man,
arguably the world’s most influential evolutionary biologist, spend most of his
time here or in the field? Prof. Richard Dawkins smiles faintly. He did not
find fame spending dusty days picking at shale in search of ancient trilobites.
Nor has he traipsed the African bush charting the sex life of wildebeests.
He gets little charge from such exertions.
“My interest in biology was pretty much always on the philosophical
side,” he says, listing the essential questions that drive him. “Why do we
exist, why are we here, what is it all about?”
It is in no fashion to diminish Professor Dawkins, a youthful 70, to
say that his greatest accomplishment has come as a profoundly original thinker,
synthesizer and writer. His epiphanies follow on the heels of long sessions of
reading and thought, and a bit of procrastination. He is an elegant stylist with
a taste for metaphor. And he has a knack, a predisposition even, for assailing
orthodoxy.
In his landmark 1976 book, “The Selfish Gene,” he looked at evolution
through a novel lens: that of a gene. With this, he built on the work of fellow
scientists and flipped the prevailing view of evolution and natural selection
on its head.
He has written a string of best sellers, many detailing his view of
evolution as progressing toward greater complexity. (His first children’s book,
“The Magic of Reality,” appears this fall.) With an intellectual pugilist’s
taste for the right cross, he rarely sidesteps debate, least of all with his
fellow evolutionary biologists.
Although he is a political liberal, he has taken on more than a few
leftists in his writings — particularly those who read his theory of genes as
sanctioning rapacious and selfish behavior.
Of late he has taken up the cudgel for atheism, writing “The God Delusion,” an
international best seller. When Martin
Rees, Britain’s astronomer royal, recently accepted a prize from the
John Templeton
Foundation, which promotes a dialogue between science and religion,
Professor Dawkins was unforgiving. Dr. Rees, he wrote, is a “compliant
quisling,” a traitor to science. Dr. Rees declined to counterpunch.
Professor Dawkins often declines to talk in San Francisco and New
York; these cities are too gloriously godless, as far as he is concerned. “As
an atheistic lecturer, you are rather wasting your time,” he says. He prefers
the Bible Belt, where controversy is raw.
He insists he frets before each lecture. This is difficult to imagine.
He is characteristically English in his fluid command of words written and
spoken. (Perhaps this is an evolutionary adaptation — all those cold, clammy
English days firing an adjectival and syntactical genius?)
He is gracious without being gregarious. Ask him to explore an idea
and he’ll rummage happily. But he keeps the door to his private life firmly
latched.
(Briefly, he has a daughter, who is a doctor. He is married for the
third time, to the actress Lalla Ward. He is on friendly enough terms with his
first wife, the zoologist Marian Stamp Dawkins, that she wrote an essay for a
2006 book celebrating her former husband’s lifetime of accomplishment.)
African Roots
Clinton Richard Dawkins was born in Kenya, where his father was an
agricultural specialist with the colonial service. He later returned with his
parents to England and in due course arrived at Oxford, an intelligent enough
boy. “I didn’t have a very starry school career,” he says. “I was medium to
above average, nothing special.”
He lighted his own intellectual fire at a university peculiarly suited
to his temperament. Oxford relies on the tutorial system, in which students
burrow into original texts rather than textbooks.
“I
loved it; I become easily temporarily obsessed,” Professor Dawkins says. “I did
not end up as broadly educated as my Cambridge colleagues, but I graduated
probably better equipped to write a book on my chosen subject.”
(From that
experience he drew a dislike of the current establishment insistence —
bordering on mania — for standardized tests and curriculums. He views this as
antithetical to true learning.)
EARLY
DAYS
Dr.
Dawkins, standing at right in a family photo from 1958, before he entered
Oxford. "I didn't have a very starry school career," he says.\
After graduating in
1962, he studied with Nikolaas Tinbergen, a Nobel-winning scientist,
and taught at the University of California, Berkeley. He returned to Oxford in
1971. He was working out his thoughts on sociobiology, which took form a few
years later in “The Selfish Gene.”
At the time, the predominant popular view of evolution was that
animals and insects worked together, albeit unconsciously, and that natural
selection acted on individuals to do what was good for their species.
Cooperation, again unconscious, seemed woven into nature.
Professor Dawkins’s voice slides playfully into High David
Attenborough style as he mimics the mellifluous tone of BBC documentaries of
the time: “The dung beetle is the refuse collector of the natural system, and
where would we be without them? And male deer fight but take care not to kill
each other.”
He stops. “That sort of thinking was pretty dominant in the culture.”
Artful pause. “And it’s plain wrong. I wanted to correct that ubiquitous
misunderstanding.”
Genes, he says, try to maximize their chance of survival. The successful
ones crawl down through the generations. The losers, and their hosts, die off.
A gene for helping the group could not persist if it endangered the survival of
the individual.
Such insights were in the intellectual air by the mid-1960s. But
Professor Dawkins grasped the power of metaphor — that selfish gene — and so
made the idea come alive. Andrew Read, a professor of natural history at Penn
State, recalls reading “The Selfish Gene” and feeling his world change.
“Gone in a stroke was the intellectually barren ‘it just is’
hypothesis,” he wrote in an essay. “ ‘The Selfish Gene’ crystallized it
and made it impossible to ignore.”
Not everyone bought the argument. The moral implications proved deeply
troubling, suggesting that altruism disguised selfish, gene-driven behavior.
“Many readers experienced the book as a psychic trauma,” wrote Dr. Randolph
Nesse, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Michigan. “It turned
their moral worlds upside down.”
Prominent scientists and intellectuals cast Professor Dawkins as the
herald angel of a selfish culture, accusing him and his fellow sociobiologists
of setting the cultural stage for the “I got mine” age of Ronald Reagan and
Margaret Thatcher. The evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin, a man of the political left,
painted a picture out of a George Orwell novel. “If biological determinism is a
weapon in the struggle between classes,” he wrote with two other scientists,
“then the universities are weapons factories, and their teaching and research
faculties are the engineers, designers.”
To Professor Dawkins, this badly distorted his science and his
political leanings, which are resolutely liberal. (He opposed the Vietnam and
Iraq wars, admires President Obama and votes most often with Labor. More
recently, he voted for the Liberal Party in his district, as he admired the
fact that the member of Parliament was insistently secular. The member lost in
2010, to an evangelical Conservative.) He was writing about the behavior of
genes, not about psychological and emotional states.
Our glory as a species is that we can overcome our genetic impulses,
he says, acknowledging that the book’s title “perhaps lent itself to
misunderstanding.”
“It’s not the selfish individual, and certainly not the selfish
species,” he says. “My book could have just as easily been called ‘The
Altruistic Individual.’ ”
But true to himself, he does not stop at this concession. “What would
our critics have had us do, falsify the algebra?” he asks, and says of the
criticism, “It was irritatingly stupid, actually.”
Progressive Evolution?
Professor
Dawkins’s great intellectual conviction is that evolution is progressive, and
tends to lead to more and more complexity. Species, in his view, often arrive
at similar solutions to evolutionary puzzles — the need for ears, eyes, arms or
an octopus’s tentacle. And, often although not invariably, bigger brains. So
the saber-toothed tiger shows up as a cat in Europe and Asia, and as a
marsupial in South America. Different species seized on the same carnivorous
solution. (He most certainly does not, however, view evolution as progressing
toward us, that is humans — were we to disappear, some other species most
likely would fill our evolutionary niche.)
“There are endless
progressions in evolution,” he says. “When the ancestors of the cheetah first
began pursuing the ancestors of the gazelle, neither of them could run as fast
as they can today.
“What you are looking at is the
progressive evolutionary product of an arms race.”
So it would be no great surprise if the interior lives of animals
turned out to be rather complex. Do dogs, for example, experience
consciousness? Are they aware of themselves as autonomous animals in their
surroundings?
“Consciousness has to be there, hasn’t it?” Professor Dawkins replies.
“It’s an evolved, emergent quality of brains. It’s very likely that most
mammals have consciousness, and probably birds, too.”
(He has embraced the Princeton University philosopher Peter Singer’s Great Ape Project, which would accord legal
rights to apes, including a prohibition against torture.)
His theory of progressive evolution, it should be said, is
controversial. Professor Dawkins had a single great rival in writing about
evolutionary biology: Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard.
Professor Gould, who died in 2002, was adamant that evolution was
contingent — that while a species might progress in leaps and bounds, it was
equally likely that it might reach a dead end, or regress. If a meteorite hit
Earth and destroyed all intelligent life, he argued, the chances are
vanishingly small that complex, intelligent life would evolve again.
As the writer Scott Rosenberg put it, Professor Gould saw our species
as “simply a tiny accident occurring on a minor side-branch of the evolutionary
tree.”
The two evolutionary biologists had well-armored egos, their
intellectual battles were spectacular, and they did not share laughs over pints
afterward. Professor Dawkins acknowledged their prickly relationship in writing
an appreciation of his rival, who died of cancer: “Gould and I did not tire the
sun with talking and send him down in the sky.”
Professor Dawkins feels more than a tinge of regret that he and
Professor Gould did not appreciate each other more.
“Gould wanted to downgrade the conceit that it all progressed towards
us, towards humans, and I fully approved of that,” he says now, even as he
makes sure to add, “But evolution most certainly is progressive.”
There is a final cosmic joke to be had here.
The two men quarreled about everything save their shared atheism. But
Professor Dawkins’s closest intellectual ally on progressive evolution and
convergence is Simon Conway Morris, the renowned Cambridge
evolutionary paleontologist.
And Professor Morris, as it happens, is an Anglican and a fervent
believer in a personal God. He sees convergence as hinting at a teleology, or
intelligent architecture, in the universe.
Ask Professor Dawkins about his intellectual bedfellow, and his smile
thins. “Yes, well, Simon and I have converged on the science,” he says. “I
should think in the world there are not two evolutionary scientists who could
rival each other in their enthusiasm for convergence.”
As to Professor Morris’s religious faith? “I just don’t get it.”
Impatience With Religion
Aren’t the theologian’s questions — Why are we here? Is there
something larger than us? Why do we die? — central to the human project?
Professor Dawkins shakes his head before the question is out. His
impatience with religion is palpable, almost wriggling alive inside him. Belief
in the supernatural strikes him as incurious, which is perhaps the worst insult
he can imagine.
“Religion teaches you to be satisfied with nonanswers,” he says. “It’s
a sort of crime against childhood.”
And please spare him talk of spiritualism, as if that were the only
way to meditate on the wonder of the universe. “If you look up at the Milky Way
through the eyes of Carl Sagan, you get a feeling in your chest of something
greater than yourself,” he says. “And it is. But it’s not supernatural.”
It
is a measure of Britain’s more resolutely secular culture that Professor
Dawkins can pursue his atheism and probing, provocative views of Islam and
Christianity in several prime-time television documentaries. In one, he
interviewed young women in a Muslim school that receives state funds.
“One said her
ambition was to be a doctor. But she explicitly said if there is a
contradiction between science and the Koran, then the Koran was right,” he
says. “They were lovely girls, but utterly brainwashed.”
Critics grow
impatient with Professor Dawkins’s atheism. They accuse him of avoiding the
great theological debates that enrich religion and philosophy, and so
simplifying the complex. He concocts “vulgar caricatures of religious faith
that would make a first-year theology student wince,” wrote Terry Eagleton, regarded as one of Britain’s
foremost literary critics. “What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the
epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus?”
Put that charge to Professor Dawkins and he more or less pleads
guilty. To suggest he study theology seems akin to suggesting he study fairies.
Nor is he convinced that the ecumenical Anglican, the moderate imam, the
Catholic priest with the well-developed sense of irony, is religion’s truest
representative.
“I’ve had perfectly wonderful conversations with Anglican bishops, and
I rather suspect if you asked in a candid moment, they’d say they don’t believe
in the virgin birth,” he says. “But for every one of them, four others would
tell a child she’ll rot in hell for doubting.”
That, he says, explains why he is writing a book for children. He
wants to raise questions — Why is there a sun? What is an earthquake? What
about rainbows? — and provide clever, rational answers. He has toyed with
opening his own state-sponsored school, though under the British system he
would have to come up with matching money.
But it would not be a school for atheists. The idea horrifies him. A
child should skip down an idiosyncratic intellectual path. “I am almost
pathologically afraid of indoctrinating children,” he says. “It would be a
‘Think for Yourself Academy.’ ”
Human Gods
After two hours of conversation, Professor Dawkins walks far afield.
He talks of the possibility that we might co-evolve with computers, a silicon
destiny. And he’s intrigued by the playful, even soul-stirring writings of Freeman Dyson, the theoretical physicist.
In one essay, Professor Dyson casts millions of speculative years into
the future. Our galaxy is dying and humans have evolved into something like
bolts of superpowerful intelligent and moral energy.
Doesn’t that description sound an awful lot like God?
“Certainly,” Professor Dawkins replies. “It’s highly plausible that in
the universe there are God-like creatures.”
He raises his hand, just in case a reader thinks he’s gone around a
religious bend. “It’s very important to understand that these Gods came into
being by an explicable scientific progression of incremental evolution.”
Could they be immortal? The professor shrugs.
“Probably not.” He smiles and adds, “But I wouldn’t want to be too
dogmatic about that.”
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