Author of the week: Richard Dawkins

last updated 8 January 2015

Outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins is currently offering America a remedial education on the subject of evolution, said Stefanie Marsh in the London Times. More than 30 years after his first book, The Selfish Gene, presented a fresh way of thinking about how evolution might work, the prominent author-biologist has produced a new book, The Greatest Show on Earth, that returns to basics. Alarmed that 40 percent of Americans now believe that the world is less than 6,000 years old—and that a rising share of his British compatriots are also creationists—Dawkins decided to present the “evidence” that makes evolution undeniable. “I’m not offended by honest ignorance,” he says. “A great number of people simply don’t know what evolution is.”

Dawkins concedes that his reputation as a thinker may have suffered since he lambasted monotheism in 2006’s The God Delusion. “Because religion is seen as off-limits, I’m seen as excessively angry and polemical,” he says. But Dawkins isn’t even himself a strict rationalist. He readily admits that human beings may simply never be capable of explaining everything about our universe. “I think we all think that there’s something else out there. I do, certainly. It’s just not supernatural.” For instance, Dawkins says, somewhere beings may exist that are “superhuman to a level that our imaginations cannot grasp”. Even so, evolution would explain their development, too. “Superhuman,” he said in The Wall Street Journal, “does not mean supernatural.”