Mossman gives her account of an interview of early December, 2021 with Richard Dawkins.....
"Scientists spend their life converting one language into another to explain things to laymen, graciously. Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, published in 1976, was read by sixth formers and spawned a rush in popular science books. But its neo-Darwinian thesis – that what an animal is doing is maximizing its genetic representation in future generations – was of huge professional, as well as public, influence. On the book’s 40th anniversary, Nature magazine wrote that Dawkins had helped explain what was going on inside the genome long before DNA sequencing became routine.
If the book also generated considerable controversy, this stemmed largely from a misunderstanding arising from the title: the geneticist John Maynard Smith, one of a handful of scientists then espousing a gene-centric view of evolution, pointed out in the London Review of Books that Dawkins was not arguing that the “selfish gene” was also a force at work in morality, politics and human sciences. “Nobody but an idiot could think that DNA could be selfish in the conscious sense,” Dawkins says today. He has said he regrets the word “selfish”, but he clearly knows the power of a good title: his next work will be called The Genetic Book of the Dead.
Dawkins has several different registers. When he’s talking about science he shoots to the edge of the sofa. On religion, he sits back and broadcasts: atheism is still his mission. On his personal life, no questions, please, he warns in an email before we meet: “No one is interested in me.” (He has been married three times and has a daughter and a grandson.) When you ask a question that makes no scientific sense, he corrects a word in it, then gives you an answer. The sunlight from the window behind him casts his face into shadow. With his delicate nose and powerful gaze, he sometimes feels a bit like an owl. He doesn’t like being photographed, or made to pose. “What I hate is face-on,” he says. He is gallant – he’ll take your coat off and put it on for you – but he is increasingly worried about how he is being presented."
Read on. A fascinating account of a great man.... "understandably becasue what he says has probably never been said before."
For a list of his other books, see (here).
Original working URL: https://www.newstatesman.com/health-science/2021/12/richard-dawkins-interview-what-i-say-in-biology-has-become-pretty-much-orthodoxy
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