Richard Dawkins: These days what’s true doesn’t matter, it’s what you feel that counts

The biologist and renowned atheist Richard Dawkins made his name with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, in which he memorably argued that human beings were “gigantic lumbering robots” programmed to preserve their “selfish” genes. The book permanently reconfigured many readers’ understanding of the world – but plunged others into despair. One Australian reader wished he could “unread” it and blamed it “for a series of bouts of depression I suffered from for more than a decade”.

Fifty years on from the book’s publication – and with a hefty new anniversary edition to promote – Dawkins denies that depression is the sensible response to his thesis that genes are the great protagonist of life on earth. “It’s not depressing because it doesn’t really bear upon the way we as humans ought to behave,” he insists. “I mean, the word ‘selfish’ is in the title, but the selfish gene gives rise to the altruistic individual. Niceness as well as nastiness can be programmed by the selfish gene, depending upon ecological and economic circumstances.”

There are many ways, he points out, in which human beings rebel against their genes, and he cites as an example the fact that he and I “are sitting here talking, rather than propagating our gene”, which makes me rather blush. Other examples, he says, include mathematics, philosophy and music: “None of this has any direct contribution to the propagation of selfish genes. But our brains have taken off in all sorts of unlikely directions.”

We are speaking in a richly wallpapered room at the Oxford University Press office, close to where Dawkins lives with his fourth wife, Jana Lenzová, 40, a Slovakian illustrator and translator. The couple met when she was commissioned to translate The God Delusion; since then, Lenzová has provided beautiful illustrations for two of Dawkins’s books.

Now 85, and dressed in a linen shirt, dark trousers and the kind of utilitarian trainers that Gen Z loves, Dawkins is moving rather more carefully than he once did. He has given up cycling around Oxford and recently broke his arm falling down some steps; he is cast-free but the arm still hurts, he says, rotating it plaintively.

If he is more fragile than he once was, however, the old raptor gleam of intelligence remains, as does his famous intolerance for irrational thinking. “For God’s sake,” he groans when I mention the interest that many young people are taking in astrology. “I mean, the stars are fascinating – to corrupt them with this nonsense!”

He is similarly despairing about the tenor of the debate around trans rights. “The idea seems to be that it doesn’t matter what’s objectively true, what matters is the way you feel. That’s ridiculous. Just because you feel you’re a woman – I guess you can have your delusion if you like, but if you’re 6ft 4in and you go to swimming competitions and walk away with all the medals, that’s just dishonest. That’s cheating.”

What he particularly hates is the way the trans debate is sometimes framed as something unworthy of debate at all. “I really despise the tactics of the trans people, the way they won’t actually argue the case but just cancel people. That’s contemptible,” he says. “It’s horrible that they can’t actually just have a civilised conversation… You can’t discuss it. You just get people cancelled, get publishers bullied into cancelling books, and women forced to change in front of fully intact males. They’re put in female prisons… It’s a scandal.”

What does he make of the claim that vulnerable trans people might be nudged towards taking their own lives if their rights are not extended or defended? “Nonsense. That’s a great myth. These so-called suicidal people – they’re mentally screwed-up anyway.”

It is hard to imagine many other public intellectuals talking with so little reserve about a subject that causes many interviewees to visibly shrink. But Dawkins is, of course, constitutionally up for a fight. Over the years, he has made enemies of everyone from creationists (in 2011, he campaigned to ban the teaching of creationism in schools) to people with disabilities (mothers have a moral duty, he has argued, to abort foetuses that have Down’s syndrome).

Uncowed by the horrors that his near-contemporary Salman Rushdiehas faced, Dawkins has been perfectly happy to train his intellectual firepower on Islam. In 2013, he observed on Twitter: “All the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.” As condemnations duly began to rain upon him, he refused to perform the customary mea culpa, pointing out that he was “simply stating an intriguing fact”, and noting that Jews had also roundly outperformed Muslims in the Nobel stakes.

He has little time, he says, for the now near-orthodoxy – popularised by the historian Tom Holland in his book Dominion – that scientific advancements over the past few centuries have been made in part thanks to the intellectual and cultural atmosphere generated by Christianity. “Oh I’m not impressed by that at all,” he says airily. “I mean, although Tom Holland is quoted as saying that, I’ve actually read his book and it doesn’t seem to me to make the case at all. It’s true that modern science developed in Europe. Europe happened to be Christian. But I don’t see much connection between the two.”

Dawkins tends to speak more harshly about Islam than about Christianity. Does he hold some religions in higher regard than others? “Well, I’ve never met an Anglican vicar I didn’t like. They’re usually very, very nice people – very altruistic and sincere. I think the sort of people who are subscribed to it professionally like that are fundamentally decent.” They don’t, he notes, crossly, “subscribe to horrible things like the death penalty for apostasy”. Islam, by contrast, “has these awful rules”.

Kindly though Dawkins may feel towards vicars, he is withering about “Project Spire”, the Church’s much-criticised plan to provide a £100m reparation fund, in response to evidence that it was invested in slave-trading in the 18th century. “Reparations towards whom?” he asks. “You can’t give reparations to the slaves themselves. If their descendants happened to be the same colour, so what?” Dawkins himself is descended from slave-owners, and hasn’t, he confirms with a scowl, considered donating his book earnings to descendants of anyone his relatives might have kept in bondage.

Dawkins was recently said by the American podcaster Joe Rogan to have mellowed a little; and some of his vociferousness of old does indeed seem to have softened (he once funded a bus ad that read: “There is probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life”). A friend who once had dinner with Dawkins said he didn’t find it funny when he was teasingly asked to say grace. But these days, Dawkins is happy to go to church – for weddings and so on – and clearly loves being in them. “I think they’re beautiful buildings, they’re lovely. And the music is lovely as well, and the stained-glass windows. I would certainly be very sorry if they were pulled down.”

It’s no surprise that Dawkins is sometimes accused of adopting a “cakeist” attitude to Anglicanism – energetically undermining the tenets of the faith in his books and media appearances, while identifying as a “cultural Anglican” and waxing lyrical about church buildings and staff. What is the self-respecting atheist to do in a church these days? “Well, I can’t sing anymore,” he says, “but if I could, I would sing the hymns.”

When Charles Darwin, Dawkins’s hero, died in 1882, the naturalist was rumoured to have had a deathbed conversion to Christianity. The evangelist Lady Hope put it about that Darwin had rued setting out his theory of evolution as he had done, and that he had asked her to muster a congregation so that he could “speak to them of Jesus Christ and his salvation”. Hope’s word was later discredited by people who had actually been present at Darwin’s deathbed, including his children.

Dawkins is similarly sure that he will not have a conveniently late-stage volte-face on the God question. Is he not tempted to put a word in, just in case? “I’m absolutely sure I won’t have a deathbed conversion,” he says with a sharky grin. “I’d be rather distressed if some liar made that out.”

He doesn’t seem greatly worried by the prospect of dying – the alternative, he believes, would be worse. “I think what is frightening is the idea of eternity.” Besides, he points out, the state of not being alive is not a state of suffering. “Was it Mark Twain who said, ‘I was dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and never suffered the smallest inconvenience’?”

Still, he hopes to live for a long time yet – his father died at 95, and his mother at 102 – not least because he feels he has much yet to do. “I love life and want to go on as long as possible, but that’s because I love life. I’m still writing books and I’m keen to go on learning and writing.” He is working on his first novel – a work of science-fiction – but says mournfully that he is struggling with the dialogue (friends who have read it report that all his characters sound like him).

He plays a musical instrument a little, too, and is a doting grandfather to his eight-year-old grandson, “a gorgeous child”. I want to ask more about his family life – Lenzová is wife number four, and wife number two, Lalla Ward, is an actress who appeared in Doctor Who. But as he detects my advances, Dawkins looks at me sharply, rather like a red kite might at its supper. “Nothing personal,” he says.

Dawkins was born in 1941 in Nairobi, where his father served during the war. By the time the family moved to England, when Dawkins was eight, he had developed a love of wildlife (this is one of the deep pleasures of his books, which bristle enjoyably with manipulative ants, cunning butterflies and psychopathic cuckoos). At prep school, he was religious enough to be confirmed. But when he was about 16 and studying at Oundle, “there were two or three of us who together rebelled against it”, and he started refusing to kneel for prayers.

After school, he followed the family tradition of going to Balliol, Oxford, where he studied zoology; then he went into academic research. He began writing The Selfish Gene in 1972, thanks to the industrial power cuts that had interrupted his laboratory research. By the time the blackouts had ended, he was just two chapters in, but he returned to the book in a sabbatical in 1975.

Many science books age rather badly. But when I read The Selfish Gene as a 15-year-old in the 2000s, it felt fresh and subversive and genuinely mind-bending; 50 years on from publication, it still does. Did Dawkins expect the book to make such a mark? “I didn’t give it much thought, actually; one doesn’t at that age,” he says. Still, he adds: “I jokingly referred to it while I was writing it as ‘my bestseller’. I didn’t think it really would be.” To date, Dawkins says, the book has sold around three million copies, about the same as his other monster hit, The God Delusion.

A difficulty that some readers have with The Selfish Gene – and, indeed, many of Dawkins’ other works – is its implication that human beings only exist in order to do the bidding of their genes, which in turn are motivated by an unconscious drive to make copies of themselves. Dawkins attributes even apparently altruistic behaviour to the selfishness of the gene. The idea reminds me, I tell him, of the Christian idea that we are born with original sin. “It’s funny, when it first came out, the two chaplains of my college both took me aside and said it reminded them of original sin,” he says.

I want to find out from Dawkins how to live well in the post-God age, but I get the impression that he hasn’t entirely grappled himself with the moral implications of the science he has set out: “I’m not some kind of sage,” he insists at one point. Still, he says, he believes that “we need to study Darwinism in order to learn how not to behave”.

If not faith, then what are we to base our morality on? He likes, he says, the idea of the golden rule. “We would all like to live in a society where people are nice to each other, and kind, and where we help the sick and the unfortunate. And I think we do seem to be programmed to do that. I mean, when you see a crying child, you feel you want to go and comfort it.”

Once a Lib Dem voter, he has had to turn his back on the party “because they think women have penises”. What does he make of Britain’s bumpy politics in general? “I’m kind of opting out for the moment,” he says, sounding rather weary.

For all the starkness of his books’ ideas, Dawkins’s daily life is not, he assures me, infused with the awareness that he is deep-wired to seek the propagation of his genes. “It doesn’t impinge upon my actual life as a human being at all.” But he does, he says, “have a sense of wonder at the fact that all these living things around us – all these trees and animals and humans – are stupendously complicated machines. It’s really beautiful that we understand how that comes about, and that’s thanks to Darwin and his successors. It is a wonderful thing to be living in a century where we understand why we exist.”

For some, the compensations of understanding the science behind human existence – as far as it goes – seem meagre. Many would prefer to feel continuously looked after by some kind of benevolent god. “I often meet the argument, ‘why not let people have their delusions’, and I veer the other way,” Dawkins shrugs. “I veer towards respecting the truth.”

He is well aware of the fears that getting the truth out there – in an age of rampant misinformation on social media, and credulousness off it – can be difficult. Even so, he isn’t full of gloom about the state of things currently. When he was a younger man, he says, “I thought to myself, if ever there’s a time when people are not interested in the truth, I shan’t want to go on living. And I don’t think that’s anything like where we are now.”

We are sitting in huge armchairs, with our iPhones on the table beside us, and at 6pm, Dawkins’s phone emits a banshee wail: it’s his alarm that reminds him to take his pills, he says. Is he a phone addict like the rest of us? “I check my emails very, very frequently, but I don’t do what’s called doomscrolling,” he says. How does he resist? “I don’t see much appeal in it.” He has a large social media following – 2.8 million on X – and used to be a colourful and regular tweeter. But his enthusiasm for the sport has waned.

Social media gives a voice, he explains, “to the kind of people who would never get published… It’s writing on a toilet wall, isn’t it? In some cases they don’t have their own name, they call themselves Fuzzy Wuzzy. Even if they do use their own name, they’re never going to meet you. It’s a bit like road rage, where you’re encased in the bubble of your car and you can shake your fist. But if you actually met somebody face to face, you’d be polite.”

Fifty years ago, Dawkins was a fresh-faced biologist setting out a bold argument about genes to an unsuspecting – and much more Christian – country. Where does he reckon we’ll be in another 50 years? “I’m an evolutionist; 50 years is just nothing,” he says. “You’d be very rash to predict the future of any particular species, apart from the fact that most of them go extinct.”

We might have a better chance than most animals of avoiding extinction, however, “because we’ve got technology”. And though he accepts that it is nonsensical to worry about his legacy – he will after all not be around to see it – he worries about it all the same, he admits. “I think I’d like to be remembered as somebody who loved science and loved communicating it.” I think the chances of that are very high indeed.

The Selfish Gene: 50th Anniversary Edition by Richard Dawkins (OUP, £12.99) is out now

[Source: Daily Telegraph]