Richard Dawkins: The Biologist's Tale
Doug Brown, Powells.com
From his humble beginnings as a student of Nobel laureate Niko
Tinbergen, Richard Dawkins has become the Charles Simonyi Professor of the
Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, and one of the most popular
science writers in the world. 
His first book, The
Selfish Gene, offered a new way of looking at the biological world. In that
book Dawkins argued life works in terms of replicators and vehicles; replicators
can be genes riding around in the protein vehicles they make, or ideas riding
around in their neural vehicles. For this latter notion of ideas as replicators,
Dawkins coined the term meme, a concept other theoretical biologists
have recently begun fleshing out. In The
Extended Phenotype, Dawkins argued that structures that animals are genetically
hardwired to produce such as bird nests and beaver dams should
be evolutionarily considered as part of the organisms. The
Blind Watchmaker provided a concise defense of Darwinian evolution, refuting
many of the creationist arguments which have recently resurfaced under the rubric
of intelligent design.
Dawkins's consistent championing of Darwinian natural selection has resulted
in his being labeled an "ultra-Darwinist," a label he isn't quite sure if he
deserves. His interpretations of evolution were famously often
at odds with another recent popularizer of evolution, Stephen
Jay Gould. Dawkins came to Powells promoting his latest opus, The
Ancestor's Tale, a history of evolution told in a pilgrimage back through
time. Structured in a format loosely based on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, The
Ancestor's Tale offers many fascinating glimpses into the amazing diversity
of life on Earth. Before the reading Doug Brown was fortunate enough to pick
Dawkins's brain on everything from beaver dams to Wodehouse.
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"Dawkins...is an excellent guide, both a profoundly original scientific thinker and a marvelously adept explainer." Carl Zimmer, The New York Times Book Review
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"This important book could hardly be more exciting." The Economist
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"Without question [he] is the most brilliant and compelling propagandist of Darwin today." Michael Schrage, Wired
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"Beautifully and superbly written....It is one of the best science books I have ever read." Los Angeles Times
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The Extended Phenotype carries on from where The Selfish Gene takes off. A fascinating look at the evolution of life and natural selection.
Doug: What was your initial reaction to the Homo floresiensis find?
Richard Dawkins: I was very excited by it. I love the thought that
it might even still be alive, which was one of the speculations that was made.
I immediately wondered whether there could possibly be DNA that you could extract.
This thing is only 18,000 years old, and so that's young enough that there could
be some DNA there, which would be terrific. I wrote an article about it in the
Sunday Times of London and a similar one in the Los Angeles Times.
There is a certain amount of suspicion that it might not be what it seems
to be. It's possible that it is a genetic mutant of Homo sapiens. It
has some of the properties of a well-known kind of genetic dwarfism. After all,
there is only one skeleton that has been found, apart from the odd tooth, so
it may not be a different species at all. The DNA would settle that, and that's
another reason it would be nice to get DNA from it.
Doug: A further question on hominid classification; do you think humans
should be sunk into the family Pongidae, or the apes moved into Hominidae?
Dawkins: I don't get too worked up about taxonomic questions of that
sort. To me what matters is what might follow from it, which would be things
like ethical considerations. I suppose a purist taxonomist would take a different
view, but I am not a purist taxonomist. I'm interested in evolution itself,
so I don't much care about names.
Doug: So you're not as worked up about Linnaeus's kingdom/phylum system
being replaced with some sort of phyletic branching classification system?
Dawkins: No, not worked up, no. I get quite impatient with people who
get hot under the collar about that kind of thing.
Doug: They are artificial designations that we have put onto organisms
and systems.
Dawkins: Yes.
Doug: So similar to that, are subspecies useful for seeing possible
evolutionary events?
Dawkins: I suppose so. The only level in that taxonomic hierarchy that
has any pretense of being objectively definable is the species. Above that and
below that it is subjective, so I wouldn't get too worked up about that either.
Doug: Something that was often played up in the popular media was the
supposed feud between yourself and Stephen
Jay Gould. What areas did you agree on, and where were your primary points
of difference?
Dawkins: We agreed on our sense of wonder at the natural world, and
our love for it. We agreed that evolution is a fact, that natural selection
is the only source of adaptation. We disagreed over the levels of selection
question. He liked to see natural selection working at many different levels
in the hierarchy of life, whereas I take a very purist view about that, which
is that natural selection is I would make a distinction between two different
kinds of unit of natural selection: the replicator and the vehicle. The replicator
is the thing which actually becomes less frequent or more frequent in a population
of such things, and that cannot be the individual, or the group, or the species.
Because there is no sense in which an individual becomes for example more frequent
or less frequent. The individual is either here or it isn't here, there's only
one of it. Genes on the other hand, in gene pools, most definitely are the kind
of thing that can become more frequent or less frequent. They therefore can
have success defined by their frequency in the pool of such things. I don't
think that applies to any of the other levels in the hierarchy of life, so none
of the other levels in the hierarchy of life is a true replicator. There are
others around in technology, computer viruses for example are true replicators.
But in the biological hierarchy, I think genes are it.
The vehicle, on the other hand, is a different kind of unit. An individual
organism is a unit in the sense that it behaves as a unit, looks like a unit,
runs around like a unit, has a skin all round it, has the same sort of anatomy
as other units of its type. I call it a vehicle because it is built by the genes
that it carries around inside it, and it is a machine for the preservation and
propagation of the genes or the replicators that it carries around inside it.
So there are two just different kinds of unit, the replicator and the vehicle.
Individual organisms are not replicators, they are vehicles. Could higher level
units in the hierarchy of life, like groups and species, be vehicles? Well,
maybe they could. But I don't think it's a very important type of natural selection,
inter-group selection, interspecies selection. I don't think that you would
ever look at an organ and say, "That's an adaptation to keep the species from
going extinct."
I should also say, I suppose, punctuated equilibrium. That is not a problem
for me. Punctuated equilibrium could be, as an empirical fact, an important
pattern in evolution in certain fossil lineages. What I did take exception to
was the way it was built up as something radically revolutionary and even non-Darwinian,
which is clearly nonsense. He did that by referring to Darwin
as a gradualist, which Darwin was, but not in the sense that Gould was not a
gradualist. In the sense that Darwin was a gradualist, Gould was too. Darwin
insisted on gradualism in those cases where you are trying to explain the evolution
of adaptive complexity. So, something like the evolution of an eye; the sort
of gradualist Darwin was, he insisted you couldn't suddenly get a thing like
an eye from nothing. In Darwin's time what he was fighting against was, well
really, closet creationists who thought that god gave evolution kind of a helping
hand over difficult jumps. So that's the sense that Darwin was a gradualist,
and in that sense Steve Gould was too. Punctuationism is gradualism in the sense
in which Darwin was a gradualist. There are further confusions, which is that
some people have used the name punctuation for totally different processes such
as macromutation, and actually I think Gould himself did sometimes. And even
mass extinction, because in a curious muddled way, they see it as a discontinuity.
Well, it is a discontinuity, but it is so different as a discontinuity that
it shouldn't be given the same name.
Doug: What are your views on complexity as applied to biology, particularly
the concept that the dispersal of energy can create ordered structures? Do you
think it is something that is secondary to natural selection?
Dawkins: I think it's secondary, insofar as no matter how ordered or
complex the structures that are produced like that might be, they are not adaptive;
they don't lead to improvement. What we could talk about is complex candidature
for selection. It could be that if you asked what the variation is that is offered
up for selection, it doesn't necessarily have to be, as probably Darwin thought
of it, small quantitative changes, things getting a bit longer or shorter or
fatter or thinner or blacker or whiter. But rather, complex embryology can produce
certain types of structure which don't look like single step changes from their
predecessors. For example, a mirror image of an entire complex organ. That's
the kind of thing that embryology might be capable of producing, because of
the way embryology works. So the candidature that's available for selection
to work upon might be complex, and the new variation that springs up might be
complexly different from what was available in the previous generation.
Doug: When I was a zoology student, group selection was considered
almost evil. It was something you shouldn't mention, there's no such thing.
Do you think that's too extreme of a view? Do you think there are examples of
it?
Dawkins: No, I don't think that there are, or very few. It was always
said that it was a theoretical possibility; the only thing we ever denied was
that it was evolutionarily important. It is true that there have been recent
so-called revivals of group selectionism, but I think they're talking about
a different thing. It's not entirely clear what they're talking about, there's
a certain amount of confusion. Sometimes it's kin selection, and there are people
who insist on using the term group selection for kin selection,
which I object to because the very reason Maynard Smith [John Maynard Smith]
coined the phrase kin selection as a name for Hamilton's [W. D. Hamilton] theory
was precisely to differentiate it from group selection. What's really going
on is gene selection, and sometimes that shows itself as kin-group selection,
but I don't think that's a parsimonious or helpful name for it. There are people
who call themselves group selectionists who use, for example, reciprocation.
The fact that you can get evolutionarily stable cooperative units; two organisms
cooperating or a group of organisms cooperating, because each one of them survives
better in a group than outside the group, which is of course extremely common.
That's not group selection, but it's what some people in the recent literature
are now calling group selection. What that is, is individuals surviving better
because they are in a group. The group provides a better environment to live
in, and so they seek out the group; they even take steps to keep the group together.
But that is not group selection; group selection is groups surviving better
than rival groups.
Doug: Do you think that, since natural selection acts upon organisms
that is, the phenotype does the extended phenotype get involved?
Can natural selection work on, say, beaver dams?
Dawkins: Yes, most certainly, to the extent that genes have phenotypic
effects on beaver dams, which they doubtless do. I'm quite sure you could trace
genetic change in beaver dams. I've not the slightest doubt; this is clearly
a Darwinian adaptation. It must have come about by selection of genes. That's
the whole idea of the extended phenotype, that it is phenotypes whose variation
is dependent upon genetic variation, but which is outside the vehicle. So the
extended phenotype is a conceptual breaking down of the unity of the vehicle.
None of these questions have been about this book [points to my copy of The
Ancestor's Tale]. Is that?
Doug: I'm sort of leading towards it. In fact the next question is,
the book is built upon a sort of reverse progression through evolution. One
of the misconceptions about evolution, that I know was a big point of Stephen
Jay Gould's, was the concept of progress, and whether there is any such
thing as progress. You make a good point in here that to an extent of course
there is progress, it just isn't necessarily directed. We used to have just
one-celled things, and then there were invertebrates, and now vertebrates.
Dawkins: Well, there's that, but I think there's also the fact that
again if you look at complex elegant beautiful adaptations which have many parts,
all fitting together, they it's really back to the point I referred to,
the sense in which Darwin was a gradualist. If you think about the evolution
of a really complex adaptation like an eye or an ear, then precisely because
it cannot have come about as a single chance step it had to have come about
as a gradual improvement. The first eye could hardly see anything at all, and
successive eyes saw a bit better, a bit better, a bit better. Progressively,
each aspect of the eye came in as a step building upon previous ones. That's
progressive, without any doubt at all, and the same thing must be true of any
complication adaptation. Any really well-adapted animal, whether it's adapted
as a predator, or to escape predation, whether it's a plant well-adapted to
pick up sunlight or to pick up water from the ground, all those adaptations
must be progressive. The sense of progress that Gould objected to, I would of
course agree; the idea that evolution was directed towards humans. And that
was why I wrote that book backwards; precisely because I didn't want to give
that impression.
Doug: A straw man argument that many have put forth against your selfish
gene concept is people try to say you are arguing genes are intentional, that
they want to replicate. But as you make clear in Ancestor's Tale, that is not
your position.
Dawkins: No, I would have to be stark raving mad to suggest any such
thing, of course. It's all sort of done with hindsight. Those genes that have
the effects that make them survive, it's the phenotypic effects that make the
genes survive, those are the genes that we see around us. The world simply becomes
full of genes that are good at it, where "good at it" means taking steps which
in some cases may even look intentional, but that's only with the wisdom of
hindsight.
Doug: How has the meme concept evolved for you since you first introduced
it in The Selfish
Gene?
Dawkins: It was never intended to be a contribution to the understanding
of human culture, although I would have always been delighted if it was. It
was always intended as a way of getting across the point that replicator is
a more general concept than gene, and that the whole message of The
Selfish Gene is about replicators, and it was only incidentally about genes.
I could have used computer viruses, I don't think they'd been invented then.
The meme was a didactic device to explain the generality of the concept of replicator.
If it happens to help people to understand human culture as well, so much the
better, but that wasn't my intention. It has been taken up more strongly by
Susan
Blackmore, by Daniel
Dennett, and others, and I'm delighted that they should do that, but it's
not mentioned in there [The
Ancestor's Tale] I don't think.
Doug: You mentioned it at a couple of points. You did mention Susan
Blackmore and Dennett.
Dawkins: Okay, I did mention it, yes.
Doug: One thing I was thinking about memes when preparing for this
interview, is realizing that something physically does transmit. If memories
are stored via activation energies in neural pathways?
Dawkins: Yes, yes. Of course we don't know if it's the same. In the
case of DNA we do know it's the same; when you transmit a particular gene to
your child, and the gene gets transmitted, then it is identical in the coding.
We don't know of course that that's true something must go from brain
to brain when I teach you a tune or a rhyme or something of that sort
but we don't know that the physical structure that's changed in your brain is
the same as the physical structure that's changed in my brain. I don't think
it really matters, actually, as long as the replication fidelity is maintained.
Clearly, in certain cases it is. Words are maintained. If somebody types a document,
and then the next person types from that, and the next person copies from that,
and so on and so on, there will be a few mutations, a few mistakes. But the
coded information as it appears in the phenotype, on the paper, is the same.
And that seems to me to be in a way sufficient to make the analogy at least
partly work, whether or not what goes on in the brain is the same.
Doug: Recent studies have suggested our brains might be pre-dispositioned
for varieties of religious or sacred experience, which the press has somewhat
naively referred to as "the God gene." Do you think religion might play some
adaptive role in human groups, or is it merely a virus of the mind?
Dawkins: Well, the two are not incompatible. Remember that adaptive
doesn't mean adaptive for the individual in my world, it means adaptive for
the replicator. So it's not necessary to assume religion aids human survival,
though it might. For my purposes it's only necessary that religion aids religion's
survival, which is easier to maintain. That's where the virus analogy comes
in. So if a religious idea spreads, and spreads and spreads and spreads, and
passes down though generations, and then spreads again; then, more or less by
definition, is it adaptively successful at its own level. It's an entirely separate
question whether it helps individual humans to survive. And then we get into
questions like do religious people survive better than non-religious people
because they are freed up from stress, and so they don't get stress-related
diseases and that kind of thing. I find that less interesting and less persuasive
than the idea that religious ideas are just simply good for the religious ideas
themselves.
Doug: Do you think that different types of ideas for instance,
science is also an idea that can spread from person to person but to
an extent it has a more rigorous replicating mechanism?
Dawkins: Yes, it depends. If you're asking, "Is that a virus," the
word virus tends to be used in a sort of negative sense. If you say,
"Is it a replicator," it probably does, it probably is. But like a good gene,
like a gene that replicates because it makes you survive better, makes you run
faster, or makes you more attractive to the opposite sex or something, then
scientific ideas that spread because they're good ideas are like that. Ideas
of any sort, whether religious or anything else, that spread because they spread
because they spread, regardless of, or even at the expense of, the welfare of
the individual as I think religious ones actually are then the
word virus is more applicable to them. It's like the difference between a computer
virus and Microsoft Excel; Microsoft Excel spreads because it's a good program,
and a virus spreads because it spreads.
Doug: On the subject of religion, evolution, and particularly human
evolution, have always been hot touchpoints in American education. Now creationists
have an upgraded model called intelligent design. What do you view as the primary
rebuttals to intelligent design, other than just telling people to read The
Blind Watchmaker?
Dawkins: [laughs] Well, I think the attempt to maintain that
it's not creationism is dishonest. I think the whole enterprise is deeply dishonest.
The arguments that they put forward are essentially the same, indeed they are
exactly the same. It's just a political trick to try to smuggle it in because
creationism is too heavily identified with religion, and therefore falls foul
of the Constitution, the separation between church and state. But clearly the
motivation behind intelligent design is religion. I am disturbed at the vulnerability
of American society to religious activists who seize control over local school
boards and things; in the way that activists the world over do, by being active,
and by being so dedicated, and spending time, where those of us who are serious
scientists might well feel that we had better things to do. But unfortunately
I think that, at least in America, real scientists have got to devote a tithe
of their time to combating this irritating nuisance which is a waste of time,
but unfortunately it's got to be done, I suspect.
Doug: Is it much less of a problem over on your side of the pond?
Dawkins: Well, it is, at the moment. I think it must be for political
reasons. It's not that we don't have creationists, it's just that they don't
have political power. They are just beginning to copy American mechanisms of
getting political power, and so I think we've actually got to start waking up
over there as well.
Doug: How long did it take you to write The
Ancestor's Tale?
Dawkins: Five years.
Doug: Wow. So did you start writing as soon as you had the idea, or
did you think about it a while and then start?
Dawkins: I started writing before I had the idea of going backwards.
The publisher wanted an ordinary history of life going forwards, and I had made
a start going forwards. Pretty rapidly I was cooperating with my research assistant
Yan Wong, who is acknowledged there [in The Ancestor's Tale], and we
discussed and discussed and discussed it, and we gradually came to the view
that it would be better to go backwards. We gradually formulated this idea of
the pilgrimage, and then Chaucer,
and then the tales; it sort of fell in to place step by step.
Doug: Do you have a schedule for writing, or do you write when the
muse strikes?
Dawkins: No, I wish I did. I don't really, no. I have phases when it's
going well, and I feel active and productive; and other phases when I don't.
Doug: Do you still have a teaching load?
Dawkins: Not much of one. In my new job as Professor of Public Understanding
of Science [at Oxford], I'm mostly teaching in the outside world, doing public
lectures, and books, and articles in newspapers and magazines, and broadcasting
on the radio, and things.
Doug: An ambassador for science, as it were.
Dawkins: That's a nice, phrase, yes.
Doug: What are some elements of nature or natural history that grab
your attention, that just make you say, "Wow, that's amazing!" Some things that
might have got you interested early on?
Dawkins: Well there are quite a few in The
Ancestor's Tale. For example, the story of the fly larva that digs a
we're going to be reading about it tonight it burrows in the mud to pupate,
and then the mud dries out. When the rains come next year, the imago comes out
and flies off and propagates the next generation. When the mud dries out there's
always a danger in drying mud that cracks form, and the crack might slice right
across where the larva is buried. So what they do is, before they bury themselves
in the mud, each larva corkscrews its way down in the mud, making a sort of
spiral; then it turns round and corkscrews its way back out again, in an opposite
spiral. So there's now a sort of cylinder which is weakened. It then dives into
the middle of the cylinder, where it pupates. Now when a crack comes across
the mud, when it hits this weakened ring of the cylinder, it doesn't go across
because it goes around the edge where it's weakened. I think that's a beautiful
example of apparent foresight. Other examples: spider webs, I devoted a whole
chapter to spider webs in Climbing
Mount Improbable, similarly in The
Blind Watchmaker bat echolocation. Oh gosh, there are so many. The archer
fish, shooting a jet of water up at an insect?
Doug: Freeze tolerance in frogs is one of my favorites.
Dawkins: Oh lovely, yes.
Doug: What books have you read recently?
Dawkins: Well, I've been reading novels on the tour. One by William
Boyd about the saga of one man's life starting in about 1904 and going on
until he was in his old age when he died [Any
Human Heart]. It's an entire sort of biography of the 20th century, seen
through the life of one fictional character. And then another one by Alison
Lurie, quite a slight little story about the Florida Keys; a sort of personal
story that involves lesbianism in the Florida Keys [The
Last Resort]. Those just happen to be the last two books I've read.
Doug: Are there any books that you go back to, and have read more than
once?
Dawkins: Oh yes, many. Well, not that many, but there are some that
I read over and over again. I love Evelyn
Waugh, so I've read most of his books again and again, and I love P.
G. Wodehouse, and roar with laughter again and again. I'm a bit like a child
in that respect; children love reading books over and over again.
Doug: What did you think of the Jeeves and Wooster television series?
Dawkins: Well, there have been two. The recent one with Stephen Fry
and Hugh Laurie, I thought they themselves were terribly good, but I hated the
adaptations. The script writer thought wrongly that he could do
better than P.G. Wodehouse, which he couldn't. So they ruined the stories. But
there was an earlier black and white series, with Ian Carmichael as Wooster,
and Dennis Price as Jeeves, and I far preferred them because they were really
true to the originals.
Doug: What are some big questions in science that would you like to
see answered?
Dawkins: Consciousness, which I think is immensely difficult, and I
think it's difficult to even formulate the question, and I don't know what the
answer is.
Doug: Do you think people place too much emphasis on trying to quantify
intelligence?
Dawkins: Obviously it's a controversial subject, and it's unfashionable
to try to quantify intelligence. I think it might be unwise to try to quantify
general intelligence. I think probably we've got separate dimensions of intelligence.
I notice this whenever I do an IQ test; I do very well on anything verbal, and
as soon as it comes onto those ones where you have geometric shapes that you
have to rotate in your mind, I'm completely hopeless at those. I think those
two are measuring quite different dimensions of intelligence. And of course
psychologists know this, and they do sophisticated factor analysis and things,
but the idea of a general IQ might be misleading. Although there is nothing
wrong with a composite measure; if somebody has a middling IQ which is made
up of brilliance along one dimension, and appalling performance on the other,
that might be an interesting measure. Because it's a less penetrating measure
than taking the separate dimensions separately.
Doug: In The
Ancestor's Tale you go back through time to various periods. If you could
take a time machine back, what are some of the species you would like to see,
or time periods you would like to go to?
Dawkins: Gosh. If I were to say the Cambrian, there would be the slight
problem that I would need to be a scuba diver in order to appreciate it. I think
the time of the dinosaurs would be riveting, provided one had some sort of protection
[laughs]. I think hominid evolution at the time when language was just
beginning to evolve; if I had to pick one time it might be that. I think the
origin of language, when language was just half language or quarter language,
would be really fascinating. Unless one was a really good linguist and able
to pick things up quickly, one might not even realize what was going on. You
would have to sort of understand what they were talking about in order to see
what half language was like.
Doug: One of the things you mention in The Ancestor's Tale is
the idea that one of the reasons we became bipedal was to free up our hands,
and that language might have started as hand gestures.
Dawkins: That's one of several theories of why people became bipedal.
Yes, I think that is an interesting idea.
Doug: Niko
Tinbergen was somebody who you worked with. Was he your advisor?
Dawkins: Yes he was.
Doug: What was he like?
Dawkins: He was kind, avuncular, always smiling, gentle, obstinate,
passionate about his work, about nature and Darwinism. He was a somewhat tortured
character who had periods of deep depression and ill health. Complex. A very
good, much admired, slightly exasperating way in which he would carry on worrying
away at a question, which some of us felt had already been settled [laughs].
Doug: Was he working on gulls primarily when you were there?
Dawkins: Well, he had a large group of students and postdocs, some
of whom were working on gulls. I suppose more were working on gulls than any
other single kind of animal. But he had about an equal number of students working
on a variety of different animals. He was problem driven rather than animal
driven. He didn't say, "What we're going to work on is gulls." He said, "What
we're going to work on is this problem, and we happen to know a lot about gulls,
and we've got a good setup for studying about gulls, so we're going to do it
on gulls."
Doug: So gulls were just convenient as a model species.
Dawkins: Yes. Although of course he did love them. He was a great naturalist,
and so he loved being out in the wild. But it wasn't just gulls; there were
lots of other animals.
Doug: What did you do your dissertation on?
Dawkins: Mathematical model of choice in, I actually worked on chicks,
but it could have been any animal. It was a sort of classic Popperian exercise
in that I proposed the model, deduced algebraically predictions from it, tested
them, and then went back and modified the model or proposed an extension of
it, again produced predictions, tested them and so on. Quantitatively.
Doug: If you could invite any five people from history to dinner, who
would they be?
Dawkins: Oh god, I hate those sort of questions. [Thinks for a while
between each name] Darwin.
Shakespeare.
Probably not a musician, because although I love music, I'm not sure that talking
to them at dinner is likely to be that revealing. [Another thoughtful pause]
Possibly Jesus.
Newton,
I guess. Maybe Lucy
[laughs].
Doug: What was the nonsense rhyme your great-grandfather sang when
he tied his shoes [mentioned in The
Ancestor's Tale]?
Dawkins:
Hokey pokey, winky fum,
How do you like your taters done,
Hot or cold or underdone,
King of the Cannibal Islands.
Doug: What are some of the main things you would like people to know
about The Ancestor's
Tale; what are some of the main ideas that you hope to convey to people,
other than the amazing diversity of life?
Dawkins: Well, I hope they would be amazed. I hope they would be inspired
to know where they come from, and what the string of ancestors leading all the
way back to bacteria that directly links them to the origin of life, and to
all other creatures by branching off again, is. I hope they will like the writing,
I tried to make it entertaining and easy to read. I tried to make it a page-turner,
which is hard when it's so long. I think it's easy enough in the tales. The
tales could be seen as a whole lot of different essays, a bit like Steve Gould's
essays, only strung together in a thread, which is this march backwards through
time. But they are essays which mostly can be read on their own without reference
to the rest of the book, so you can dip into it anywhere you like. Once you've
got the idea of what the pilgrimage is, you can dip into it anywhere, any way.
So there isn't really an argument, such that if you miss out on an earlier part,
you can't follow later parts. Once you've got the point of the pilgrimage, which
you get from chapter one, once you've read chapter one you can dip into it anywhere
you like. And then you might like to read the last chapter as well for the going
forward again and trying to get a summary of some principles.
Richard Dawkins
visited Powell's City of Books on October 18, 2004.
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