Human Origins / Human Evolution

“I just wouldn’t have felt comfortable saying, ‘I am a duckbilled platypus, and this is how I find my shrimps,’ ” he had said. “I think it would have been twee.”

Dawkins begins one chapter of the book with a witty and erudite introduction to the platypus, an animal renowned for the ducklike bill grafted onto its mammalian body. “It seemed so weird when first discovered,” Dawkins writes, “that a specimen sent to a museum was thought to be a hoax: bits of mammal and bits of bird stitched together. Others have wondered whether God was having a bad day when he created the platypus. Finding some spare parts left over on the workshop floor, he decided to unite rather than waste them.”

But then Dawkins delivers the scientific punch line: a lucid explanation of the platypus’s remarkable ability, embedded in its goofy Donald Duck appendage, to detect the faintest electrical signals generated by muscular twitches of shrimp and other prey buried in the mud. Some 40,000 exquisitely fine-tuned sensors arrayed in that bill manage to electrolocate food beyond the range of sight, sound, or touch; indeed, the platypus closes its eyes, ears, and nostrils while foraging. “See no prey, hear no prey, smell no prey: yet it finds prey with great efficiency,” Dawkins wrote with appreciative relish, “catching half its own weight in a day.”

Even though The Ancestor’s Tale is based loosely on the fanciful life stories shared by a group of pilgrims in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, Dawkins found himself unable to adopt the voice of a platypus or any other animal and write in the first person. He was telling me he thought it would be very “twee” to do so.

Now it turns out that was also the word Dawkins had used to make the same point in the book. So I mentioned in passing that American readers might stumble over “twee,” finding it an elusive foreign colloquialism. A brief—and rare—look of doubt crossed his face.

“Oh,” Dawkins said, sounding startled. “I guess it is. I hadn’t realized that. It sort of means . . . self-consciously attempting to be charming.” He paused, then added with a short laugh, “And failing.”

Clearly irritated—but in an intellectual, not emotional, sort of way—by this news, he got up from his chair and walked to the bookshelf in the living room to fetch—what else?—the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. “I think I’ll look that up.”

One reason Dawkins has become perhaps the best-known popularizer of science in the English language is his precision—his precise understanding of biology (especially evolution), the precise way in which he translates that knowledge into the public idiom, and the precise manner in which he builds an argument, organizes an essay, or demolishes the wobbly logic of a rival in debate. So he wanted to dispense with this twee business right away. After a few moments of silent riffling, he announced the definition. “Sweet, dainty, chic,” he read. “Now chiefly derogatory: affected and dainty or quaint.”

There is nothing affected or dainty or quaint about the way Dawkins communicates science. He has a naturalist’s love of animal behavior, a theorist’s love of bold thought, a writer’s love of the well-turned phrase. All those things make him a pleasure to read. But Dawkins is no mere retailer of cute animal tales. Whether discussing the territorial behavior of stickleback fish in The Selfish Gene or the behavior of elephant birds in The Ancestor’s Tale, he sands and shapes each anecdote with the loving care of a medieval stonemason working on a cathedral. In Dawkins’s universe, this craftsmanship serves to embellish the edifice of evolution—enhancing not only its beauty but its solidity as a soaring monument to human reason.

That monument has come under fierce attack these days—from postmodernists (to whom truth is subjective and cultural), from creationists (to whom truth is biblical), and from religion in general (where faith is often seen to compete with reason as the fount of ultimate answers). As a result, Dawkins has found himself increasingly thrust into a more active role than writer: He has waded into this battle as a self-styled paladin of scientific rationality. An unabashed atheist and an avidly polemical public intellectual, he has employed a scorched-earth vocabulary to take on religion, the evangelical right, Muslim fundamentalism, parochial education, and the faith-based political philosophy of George W. Bush.

All these battles have revealed a different side of Dawkins. As when he went to look up the word in the dictionary, he has a need not only to be precise but to be right—ruthlessly right. Dawkins has become “Darwin’s rottweiler”—as Alister McGrath, an Oxford theologian, reminded readers of his recent book, Dawkins’ God: Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of Life—so intent on prevailing in intellectual combat that he alienates others and undermines the dazzling quality of his argumentative skills. How did this mild-mannered son of an Oxfordshire farmer become such a ferocious public intellectual? That is a tale, too, involving another sort of evolution.

In person Dawkins, unfailingly gracious, is a constrained version of the witty, expansive, passionate, and intellectually provocative persona that animates the pages of his books. On the day we spoke in Oxford, he seemed guarded and somewhat reticent. At age 64, he looks fit but older than his book-jacket photos suggest, his hair short and silvered with a boyish flip in front, his gold wire-rimmed glasses lending a bit more grise to his longtime eminence.

Although certainly a scientist of the first order, Dawkins does not “do science” in any conventional sense. He occasionally writes papers but has no lab, no postdocs, no ongoing experiments. He hardly even gives any lectures at Oxford University, where he is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science. Mostly he stays at home to do what he does best—think about, and write about, evolution.

The “laboratory” for all this cogitation is a three-story stone cottage on a quiet side street in Oxford, with a little wavelet of lavender lapping against the facade. Dawkins shares the home with his wife, Lalla Ward, a British actress beloved by a sizable public who grew up watching her in the BBC’s  science-fiction show Doctor Who. The home has the usual appurtenances of the writerly life, with crammed bookshelves and curios of achievement, but also the perquisites that a reliable perch on the best-seller lists can confer, such as the Panasonic wide-screen television, the office assistant on call in a nearby room, even the six-inch-thick slab of 150-million-year-old Jurassic limestone in the garden, an impression of a dinosaur footprint on its underside, that occasionally serves as a writing desk. Perhaps the most fitting inhabitants of the living room, however, are the wooden horses, hares, and bears salvaged from vintage carousels by Ward’s mother. However inanimate this bestiary, it seems a companionable backdrop for a writer whose acute explications of evolutionary theory are often animated by wonderful evocations of animal behavior.

“I want very much to communicate science to as wide an audience as possible,” Dawkins says, “but not at a cost of dumbing down, and not at a cost in getting things right. If I can lure”—he draws the word out in a honeyed way, as if it rhymed with fewer—“readers to raise their game and tackle something a bit harder than they would normally do, if I can do that in an appealing way, without dumbing down, without making it all jokey and larky and fun, but retain the integrity and lure them into it by some kind of literary merit—that would be my ideal.” Judging from the reaction of critics and book buyers, he has made good on that goal many times over.

Dawkins insists his parents were better naturalists than he. Born in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1941, he spent most of his first eight years in Nyasaland (now Malawi), where his father, who studied botany at Oxford, served in the British colonial service as an agricultural officer. “He then, out of the blue, was left a farm in the will of an extremely distant cousin,” Dawkins recalls. “I don’t think he was even aware of this cousin’s existence.” Nonetheless, the elder Dawkins returned to England and actively ran the farm, located 20 miles northwest of Oxford.

Despite his early exposure to animals and plants, Dawkins does not attribute his interest in zoology to this agrarian interlude. “I was brought up in a family which valued natural history,” he says. “Both my parents knew the names of all the British wildflowers, so as we went walking the country, I was constantly being exposed to a natural history sort of knowledge.” As a teenager, he attended the British boys’ school Oundle, which was renowned for sports. It is hard to picture Dawkins, slight of build and ferociously verbal, mixing easily among the jocks. He impressed David Barker, an older student who lived in the same house at Oundle and went on to become a biomedical researcher, as an “obviously clever” boy in occasional need of kindness. “The big heroes were sportsmen,” Barker says, “and the lesser heroes were those who were clever in class. The potential for oppression is greater when boys are living together 24 hours a day.”

Dawkins and Barker formed part of the natural history club at Oundle, but, as Dawkins puts it, “I think my own interest in biology really took off at Oxford.” In 1959 he arrived as an undergraduate and studied zoology. After graduating, he taught at the University of California at Berkeley from 1967 to 1969 as an assistant professor, and then returned to Oxford to do lab-based graduate research with Nikolaas Tinbergen, the Dutch ethologist who shared a Nobel Prize in 1973 for pioneering studies of animal behavior. During this period, Dawkins discovered the animating idea of his career—an idea that took some dense evolutionary thought inspired by Tinbergen to a new level and packaged it with an artful turn of phrase.

“What I specifically got from Tinbergen would be my phrase ‘survival machine,’ ” Dawkins says. That was another way of saying that behavior was one of the principal ways of helping an animal survive, and if survival was the name of the game in evolution, then the biological machinery that contributed to successful survival and reproductive behaviors is the key factor of evolution, even more important than individuals.

At their most fundamental level, those factors, Dawkins reasoned, were genes. “So the idea,” he says, “[was] that when you study animal behavior, you’re looking at the product of a kind of piece of clockwork machinery which was put there because of natural selection on generations of ancestors. What definitely didn’t come from Tinbergen is any emphasis on the gene as the unit of selection. He would always have thought in terms of individual survival, whereas I then tended to emphasize that that was only a means to the end of gene survival.” That little qualifying addendum reflects another form of Dawkins’s precision: He husbands the priority of his ideas as fiercely as if they were offspring and has been known to use footnotes in his books to clobber detractors and reassert the primacy of his reasoning.

When he was still an experimentalist in the early 1970s, he began to explore mathematical models of animal behavior in tests that focused on the way animals make choices. Baby chicks in a box could peck one of two keys with different pictures on them, and an electrical apparatus tallied the number of pecks. The electrical part of this anecdote is key, because it inadvertently led Dawkins to abandon the bench and pick up the pen.

“There was a terrible episode of industrial unrest,” Dawkins remembers, “and Britain went onto what was called the ‘three-day week,’ and electricity was rationed. I was doing lab experiments which required electricity. So I therefore decided to do what I sort of vaguely had thought about for a while, which was to write a book for laypeople. I wrote a couple of chapters, I think, before the electric power came on again. Those effectively were the first two chapters of The Selfish Gene.”

Published in 1976, The Selfish Gene catapulted Dawkins into the first rank of scientific literati. Gracefully describing the behavior of fish and butterflies and humpback whales, spinning out extended metaphors of great explanatory power, and conveying it all in a voice that was both familiar yet rigorous, Dawkins not only achieved a superb, lay-friendly exposition of Darwinian evolution but pushed the science into novel conceptual territory. He argued that the fundamental unit upon which natural selection acted was not the individual but rather the gene itself, which was intrinsically selfish because it engaged in a battle against other genes for survival.

Dawkins pushed this provocative idea further with a cultural twist on genes: the meme, which he defines as “words, ideas, faiths, mannerisms, and fashions” that can be reproduced, transmitted, and disseminated, almost in epidemic fashion, across cultures and between generations. The idea of the meme has taken on so much of a life of its own in the past three decades that few people remember that, in Dawkins’s original formulation, it came wrapped in black paper. He intended memes to have mostly a negative connotation, and a prime example he gave of a meme was religion.

Since the publication of The Selfish Gene, Dawkins has been widely recognized as the foremost modern explicator of Darwinian evolution. “He writes and thinks more clearly about evolutionary theory than anybody else on the planet,” says Ken Miller, a professor of cell biology at Brown University. In best sellers like The Blind Watchmaker and Climbing Mount Improbable, Dawkins has taken on creationism and ripped the notion of “intelligent design.” In Unweaving the Rainbow, he championed a secular version of natural wonder. It is impossible to pick up any of his eight books without finding a piquant opinion or lovely turn of phrase on almost every page. But perhaps his greatest contribution—greater even than his explanations of Darwinism—is his steadfast explanation-cum-celebration of the scientific method as civilization’s most powerful tool for arriving at truth. “What matters is not the facts,” he wrote in The Devil’s Chaplain, a recent collection of essays, “but how you discover and think about them.”

His popularity is such that Sir Patrick Bateson, a leading ethologist at Cambridge University, says Dawkins has been single-handedly responsible for inspiring a new generation of scientists to enter biology in the United Kingdom, and probably elsewhere. “I think Richard’s writings have unquestionably stimulated enormous numbers of people to get interested in biology,” he said. “He’s an extraordinarily effective popularizer of science, a very effective coiner of metaphors.”

But not twee. He may not have been a sports hero at Oundle, but he certainly learned something about combat, because when he wades into a public debate these days, his polemical style tends to be, in Tennyson’s immortal phrase, “red in tooth and claw.”