Richard Dawkins, arguably the most influential evolutionary biologist since Charles Darwin, has spent his life studying and promoting the theory of natural selection, while fervently opposing the “force of evil” and vestigial limb of cultural evolution: religion.
Dawkins was 32 when he began writing The Selfish Gene, his debut book that would become one of the most important scientific works since On The Origin of Species. On release in 1976, it was remarkable for appealing to both working scientists and laypeople: the first blockbuster in the now-ubiquitous popular science genre.
Eight books and 30 years later, he released a damning take-down of religion, The God Delusion, the same year that Twitter was established, in what could be viewed as an inauspicious start to this symbiotic, arguably parasitic relationship in that Dawkins usually comes off worse. When I worked at his publisher in London, it was almost a daily occurrence to hear of his latest public kerfuffle. These included an Islamist leader, an MP, the New Statesman, and once, inexplicably, Brandon Flowers, a Mormon and lead singer of The Killers.
One could see the rub: where social media exists in a boundaryless quagmire of free speech and lawlessness, Dawkins moves in spaces renowned for gatekeeping and elitism. Born in Kenya to civil servants in the British Colonial Service and educated in a private school, he was an Oxford don, then its Professor for the Public Understanding of Science for 13 years and is now an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford.
At 81,
