Richard Dawkins: ‘It’s upsetting when your own side turns against you’
‘Militant atheist’ Richard Dawkins gets combative on the ‘mimetic epidemic’ of childhood gender dysphoria, the heroic genius of Elon Musk and the obliteration of humankind.
In his bestseller The God Delusion, published in 2006, author Richard Dawkins famously wrote that the god of the Old Testament is “a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser” and “a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal … capriciously malevolent bully’’.
Not for nothing has Dawkins been described as “a poster boy for militant atheism”.
The former Oxford University professor and evolutionary biologist is also regarded as a brilliant and passionate science communicator: His 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, reframed our understanding of evolution and has been named by the Royal Society as the most inspiring science book of all time, while his latest volume, Flights of Fancy – a surprisingly lyrical work aimed at the over 12s – looks at how animals and humans have “learned to overcome the pull of gravity and take to the skies’’.
In 2013, Dawkins was voted the world’s top thinker in a Prospect magazine poll. Yet in recent years, his controversial tweets and remarks about everything from aborting Down’s syndrome foetuses to Islamic fundamentalism have provoked sharp criticism and threats of cancellation.
Now aged 81, the career controversialist will conduct a national speaking tour in Australia in February, addressing topics including the wonders of science, the importance of reason and his scepticism about religion. Ahead of his tour, which starts in Melbourne, the British author gave a typically forthright, sometimes combative interview to Review.
During this encounter, conducted over Zoom from his Oxford home, Dawkins oscillates between donnish erudition and a kind of pugnacious rationalism, as he argues that parents should not have the right to “indoctrinate” their children with their chosen religion; that human foetuses are “no more a person” than animal foetuses; that anti-vaxxers are selfish; and that transgenderism has become “a mimetic epidemic” among schoolchildren. He also warns that human beings could one day be obliterated by the same kind of meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs.
You have been called a militant atheist, and you’ve argued that religion causes wars and entrenches bigotry. Yet you use the borrowed phrase “tooth fairy agnostic” to describe yourself. Tooth fairy agnostic – that’s right. We are all actually agnostic about anything you can’t actually disprove. You can’t disprove the tooth fairy; it’s trivial to bother about it, so that’s the way I am about gods.
Why do you oppose faith schools? I am not against education in religion. I think that’s important and that children should be taught about religion because it’s such an important part of history, politics, art and music. I’m against educating in a particular religion – I’m against a child being told, “You are a member of this church and therefore this is what you believe”. I like the child to be told, “There are people who call themselves Catholics and they believe this, and there are people who call themselves Muslims and they believe that” and so on. That’s important, but children should not be told what to believe.
Would banning faith schools amount to erosion of parental choice and authority? I think children have rights, and the right of a child not to be indoctrinated is important.
You get hate mail from evangelical Christians and you are also a trenchant critic of Islamic fundamentalism. As an outspoken public intellectual, what did you think of the recent attack on The Satanic Verses author Sir Salman Rushdie? It’s horrible. It’s irrational. It’s vicious. It was allegedly perpetrated by a very foolish person who doesn’t know what he’s doing. He has been indoctrinated by his Islamic upbringing and that’s one kind of reason why I find indoctrination so bad. (The suspect, Hadi Matar, has said that Ayatollah Khomeini, who issued a fatwa against Rushdie, is, “a great person”. Matar has pleaded not guilty to attempted murder and assault charges brought against him in the US.)
Many Christian fundamentalists in the US oppose abortion. What is your view of the US Supreme Court ruling that overturned the historic Roe v Wade decision? I deplore that.
You maintain that pro-choice activists in America are using the wrong tactics. Why? I think the pro-abortion lobby is tactically unsound when they say something like, “A woman’s body is her own to do what she likes with”. I happen to think that’s right, but that’s not going to cut any ice with somebody who thinks that an embryo is a baby, and they think therefore that abortion is murder. They’ll say, “Ah, but she contains another body which is not her own.” I think we should tackle that assumption. We should say, “A foetus is no more a person than, and no more has personal feelings … than the foetus of a cow or a pig, let alone an adult cow or pig.”
You dedicate your latest book, Flights of Fancy, to the billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk. Why does he impress you? He certainly is a high flyer and he certainly is a hero of our times. I do admire him and I think that he’s an appropriate dedicatee for a book about flight. He’s a man with immense imagination and he is a genius as an engineer, a genius as an entrepreneur.
In Flights of Fancy, you note how, just decades after the Wright brothers’ historic flight, we were in the era of supersonic and space flight. Does this constitute an extraordinary burst of progress within a short time? It is rather remarkable, isn’t it? I think it’s a very good century to have lived in for that reason. In a way it’s rather sad that things (to do with space flight) are only just taking off now after the 1960s, when men first stepped on the moon, and nothing much has happened since then, until quite recently. I’m glad things are getting going again.
In 2021, the American Humanist Society withdrew an award they had given you because of an old tweet. In that tweet, you called for a discussion about the vilification of those who deny transgender people “literally are what they identify as”. How did you feel about the award being cancelled? To be honest, I had actually forgotten that I ever had that award, but it is upsetting when your own side turn against you, of course. I’d never worried about religious fundamentalists disliking me, but when it’s your own team, it’s upsetting. It’s a remarkably foolish thing for them to do, because all I did was to raise a subject for discussion.
Has academe changed for the worse in terms of restrictions on freedom of speech since you first worked at the University of California, Berkeley, and Oxford University in the 1960s and ’70s? It’s not possible to imagine that we’re going to go on with this nonsense where you can’t even discuss something.
Why is the transgender debate so heated, and such a no-go area for many commentators? You’d have to ask a psychologist or a sociologist about that. It (the debate) seems to me to be utter nonsense. Of course, there are people who suffer from gender dysphoria, and one has to be sympathetic to them. But there clearly is a mimetic epidemic, especially among schoolchildren who get persuaded that somehow the cool thing to do is to be trans, and this is a very disturbing by-product of a very genuine phenomenon, which is gender dysphoria. That is quite a rare thing, but it’s being blown up into a kind of false, common thing.
With the recent closure of the Tavistock child gender clinic, it appears the UK is adopting a more cautious approach to hormonal and surgical treatments for trans-identifying children. How do you view this development? I think we’re seeing the beginnings of a very appropriate reversal of this trend.
You have 2.9 million followers on Twitter. Do your more contentious tweets scare your publishers? Possibly, but I’m not here to talk about Twitter.
Even so, why are you drawn to Twitter, given the nasty pile-ons that are a feature of the platform? I suppose, misguidedly, I thought it was rather a good way of raising discussion. That’s why I put “discuss” at the end of so many tweets, (as) a follow-on of the Oxford tutorials. I am afraid I rather over-estimated the intelligence of the Twitter audience.
You’ve said it would be fun to fly like a bird or go hang-gliding. Does your fear of heights hold you back? I certainly wouldn’t want to jump off a cliff.
No bungy-jumping for Richard Dawkins then? I might run down a hill, maybe.
Why do you believe there is merit in people establishing a colony on another planet? This, I think, is one of the motives of Elon Musk wanting to go to Mars. It’s interesting, by the way, that NASA has just succeeded in diverting or changing the orbit of a small asteroid. They need to do it for a much bigger asteroid in order to save us from the sort of catastrophe that hit the dinosaurs. But (the recent NASA diversion) is a very important first step. It’s a magnificent feat of engineering and science and mathematics.
During the Covid lockdowns, you wrote two nonfiction books and failed to complete a novel about bringing back Homo erectus, our ancient ancestor. Have you given up on writing fiction? I abandoned that, at least temporarily. It turned out to be much more difficult than I thought.
Why do you argue the Covid pandemic has been good for science? As soon as the genetic code sequence of the virus was decoded, which nowadays can be done very swiftly, several different teams of scientists got to work on making a vaccine, and they did it in double quick time; astonishingly quickly. I think that’s a great tribute to the genius of our species.
What about the rise of the anti-vaxxers? Has that surprised you? Tragically, really stupid opposition to vaccination has been whipped up, mostly in America, but it spread to other countries as well. A lot of people don’t understand that vaccination is not just about protecting yourself, it’s about protecting society as a whole, to get herd immunity so the epidemic doesn’t spread.
Is there a selfishness inherent in the anti-vaccination movement? Yes, they just think it’s a matter of individual liberty. They don’t realise that refraining from vaccination for no very good reason is rather like driving on the wrong side of the road …. We do owe a certain curtailment of individual liberty in the interests of society.
You invented the word “meme” (an idea or behaviour that spreads from person to person within a society.) We’ve seen Donald Trump turn memes into a political art form. Were you dismayed by that? He just lies and lies all the time, and unfortunately, I think it was Goebbels who said, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” Huge numbers of Americans actually believe Trump’s lies and it’s a tragedy.
You live in Oxford and drive a Tesla. Are we all going to be driving electric cars in future? It looks like it, doesn’t it? I think that’s a very good thing.
Some detractors say your reputation as a fierce supporter of atheism is in danger of eclipsing your insights as a visionary evolutionary biologist. I hope not. I’ve only written two books about atheism and about 17 about science, so really science is by far the more important part of my life.
The God Delusion has sold millions of copies, but what do you regard as your most significant book? Probably The Extended Phenotype, which is one book that I wrote for my professional colleagues, although I like to think it’s readable by nonscientists as well. It’s the main book in which I propose something which I suppose is original; something that is all my own.
Scientists don’t know how the universe started. Isn’t that an argument in itself that a god or creator must have kicked things off? That’s a terrible idea! The idea that just because you don’t know what the answer to a question is, therefore god did it. I mean, that’s a ridiculous argument. By all means say we don’t know – that’s true, we don’t know – therefore it’s better to try to find out. We don’t just lie down and say, “Oh, god must have done it”.
Across the globe millions of people, including those without a financial safety net, find comfort in religion. Can you see how rubbishing their spiritual beliefs can be perceived as arrogance? Not arrogance. I mean, if they don’t want to read my books, they don’t have to. My books are about what I believe to be true and what evidence is. I’m not going to refrain from writing books for fear that it might upset people. I write books about what is supported by scientific evidence. That is what I try to do, and if the evidence changes, of course I change my mind. That’s about it, really. I’m a scientist who writes books about science.
This is an edited interview with Richard Dawkins, whose national speaking tour opens at the Plenary Theatre, Melbourne, on February 17 before heading to Sydney, Perth and Brisbane.
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