Richard Dawkins on New Threats to Science—From Religion to Relativism

Few living thinkers have been as influential—or controversial—as Richard Dawkins. An evolutionary biologist by training, Dawkins rose to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which revolutionized the public understanding of evolution by shifting the focus from organisms to the genes that shape them (as well as surfacing the now-ubiquitous concept of the meme, which Dawkins defined as units of cultural transmission or imitation). In the decades since, he has become almost as well known for his critiques of religion as for his scientific work, with 2006's The God Delusion establishing him as one of the world's most outspoken atheists. Dawkins' work shows why free inquiry and the scientific method are essential for human progress, especially when they are under threat from religious dogma or new forms of ideological orthodoxy.

In this wide-ranging conversation with Reason's Nick Gillespie, recorded live in September 2024 in Milwaukee as part of Dawkins' Final Bow tour, the two discuss the central metaphor of Dawkins' latest book, The Genetic Book of the Dead, which presents every organism as a kind of living archive of evolutionary history. He explains how cooperation among genes—not just competition—drives natural selection. The two also explore the role of atheism in a changing moral landscape, whether science requires a specific cultural or political environment to thrive, and what humans might gravitate toward next as belief in traditional religion continues to decline.

Reason: I first encountered your work as an undergrad. I was a double major in psychology and English. When reading your work, I couldn't believe that I was reading science because I understood what you were saying. But in The Genetic Book of the Dead, you use a term—palimpsest—as a controlling metaphor. What is a palimpsest, and why is it so important to what you're doing in this book?

Dawkins: A palimpsest is a manuscript which is erased and then the parchment is used again. In the days when paper was not available, people wrote on parchment. It was quite scarce; they would reuse it. The point of it in the book is that every animal bears in itself—in its genes and in its body—a description of the worlds in which its ancestors survived. This, it seems to me, follows from natural selection. The animal has been put together by a whole lot of selection pressures over many millions of years.

In the book, you talk about how that palimpsest is sometimes literally on the organism's skin or shell. What's a good example of that?

Any camouflaged animal that sits on the background that it resembles. I use the example of a lizard in the Mojave Desert, which has, more or less, painted on its back a picture of desert. The whole of its back is a painting of the desert. Any camouflaged animal is an obvious example. My thesis is that that principle must apply to every cell, every biochemical process, every detail, every part of the animal.

In The Selfish Gene, you debunked the idea that we're in control as humans—you said we're being used by genes. In this book, you've outdone yourself by saying that we are actually a cooperative of viruses. I guess my question is: What do you have against human beings?

Well, The Selfish Gene had what you would call a sting in the tail—the last chapter switched to a different topic, which was memes. I thought this book should have a sting in the tail as well, and so this is this idea that we are a gigantic colony of cooperating viruses.

One of my books is called The Extended Phenotype. This is the idea that the genes in an animal work to survive not just by influencing the body of the animal in which they sit—they reach outside the animal, and part of the so-called phenotype of the genes is outside the body. An obvious example is a bird's nest or a bowerbird's bower, which is not a part of the animal but which nevertheless is a Darwinian adaptation. It's shaped by natural selection. And this must mean that there are genes for nest shape, genes for bower shape. This principle of the extended phenotype applies not just to inanimate objects like nests and bowers. It applies to other individuals. A parasite can influence the behavior of the host in which it sits in order to further its designs as a parasite. That means that the genes in the parasite are having phenotypic effects on the body and behavior of the host.

Now, if you think about a parasite in an animal—like a worm or a virus or a bacterium—its task is to get into the next host. There are two ways in which it can do this.

It can be expelled from the host in some way, like sneezed out or coughed out of the host, and then breathed in by the next host. When a parasite exits the body by some such route, it has no great interest in the survival of the host in which it sits. For all it cares, the host can die.

But what about a parasite which passes to the next host via the gametes, via the eggs or sperms of the present host? Well, a parasite whose hope for the future is to go into the progeny, into the offspring of the present host, if you think about it, its extended phenotype, its aims, its desires, its hopes for the future will be identical to the genes of the host. It will want the host to be a successful survivor. It will want the host to be a successful reproducer. It will want the host to be sexually attractive, to be a good parent, because everything about what the host regards as success, namely having offspring, will be the same as what the parasite regards as a success, namely, the host having offspring.

All our own genes: The only reason they cooperate in building us—in building the body, in building any animal—is that they all have the same interests at heart. They all get into the next generation via the gametes of the host. In other words, they have the same interest at heart in exactly the same way as a virus that gets passed on in the gametes, or a bacterium that gets passed on in gametes. So that's why I say that all our own genes can be regarded as equivalent to a gigantic colony of cooperating viruses.

Are you becoming a softy? When you published The Selfish Gene in 1976, evolution seemed to me more about competition and the survival of the fittest. Now you're speaking more about cooperation. What moved you away from competition and toward cooperation?

I think that's a misunderstanding. I'm not becoming a softy, or rather, I always was a softy, because The Selfish Gene is not really about selfishness. It's about selfishness at the level of the gene, but that translates out into altruism at the levels of the individual, or it can. And that's largely what the book is about. Genes are selfish in the sense that they are striving to get into the next generation. That's what they do. They are, in a sense, immortal. But they do it by cooperating. I've always said that.

In The Selfish Gene, there's a chapter in which I have the analogy of a rowing race where you have eight men sitting in a row in a boat, and they're cooperating. That's what the genes are doing. The genes are cooperating in building a body that will carry all of them to the next generation via reproduction. So they have to cooperate.

We're always looking for the gene that controls this or controls that. You say that's a misnomer. Where does that misunderstanding come from?

When you talk about a gene for anything, it's tempting to think that there's a gene for this bit and a gene for this bit. It's not like that. Genes are more like the words of a recipe or a computer program, where they work together to produce a whole embryo, and then a whole body. Genes cooperate in the process of embryology.

The reason why you can, to some extent, talk about a gene for that is that you focus on the differences between individuals. Gregor Mendel, for example, studied wrinkled peas and smooth peas. Well, what he's really talking about there is individual differences. A genetic difference controls an individual difference. Say, the Habsburg chin—the hereditary malformation of the chin which affected the royal families of Europe. There are lots and lots of genes that enter into the making of a chin, but what this particular gene does is to make the difference between somebody who has the Habsburg chin and somebody who doesn't. So "gene for X" always means "gene for the difference between somebody who has X and somebody who doesn't have X."

You also talk about how a cultural change can have evolutionary consequences, such as the taming of fire and the shrinking of jaws and teeth.

There's a book by Richard Wrangham, who's an anthropologist at Harvard, about the importance of cooking on human evolution. One of the things you see as you look at the human fossil record is that our jaws have shrunk. Our ancestors had much bigger, more powerful jaws than we have. Wrangham thinks that this is because of the discovery of fire, the invention of cooking, which enabled us to make food less tough. We didn't need such powerful jaws. And so that's an interaction between culture, namely the taming of fire and the development of cooking, and genetic evolution.

Over what time period does that emerge?

Well, it looks as though Homo erectus, which is our immediate ancestor species, which lived about a million years ago, had fire. It's not absolutely definite, but there do appear to be archeological remains of hearths suggesting that they had fire, and they probably had cooking. At least Wrangham thinks so. So maybe a million years.

Last year, you wrote an article in The Spectator called "Why I'm sticking up for science" about the adoption of certain Māori origin myths being presented as science in New Zealand schools. What was going on there?

This is a very strange business. I arrived in New Zealand and was immediately aware that I was in the midst of a great controversy. The New Zealand government—which was then a socialist government; it's changed now, but the present government is doing the same thing—is importing compulsorily into science classes in New Zealand schools, Māori myths. And they are being given equal status to what they call "Western science." Which is just science. It's not "Western"; it's just science.

So the children in New Zealand are, I would have thought, being bewildered by, on the one hand, learning about the big bang and the origin of life and DNA and things like that; on the other hand, they're being told it's all due to this sky father and the earth mother probably having it off together. It's pandering to, I think, a kind of guilt that white New Zealanders feel toward the Māori indigenous population, and bending over backward to show respect to the indigenous population. And I think that's fine—it would be great for New Zealand children to learn about Māori culture and myths in classes on anthropology and history. But to bring them into science classes—that's just not science.

I became involved because a number of distinguished scientists in New Zealand—fellows of the New Zealand Royal Society, which is the New Zealand equivalent of the National Academy of Sciences here—had written a letter protesting about this to a New Zealand journal called the Listener. As a consequence, they had their lectures canceled, they were threatened with expulsion, really quite unpleasant victimization of these distinguished scientists. And I had lunch with about half a dozen of them and heard all about it from them.

Broadly speaking, how important is it that you were born at a time when you were able to take advantage of a liberal political era so that you could do a lot of the work that you did? If you had been born 200 years earlier or 20 years later, maybe not, right?

Totally. Very, very important.

What do you think accounts for that kind of social and moral progress that makes us more open as a society?

I am fascinated by this. In one of my books, The God Delusion, I talk about the shifting moral zeitgeist. Something changes as the centuries go by. You've only got to go back to, say, the mid–19th century, where people like Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Henry Huxley—who were in the vanguard of enlightened liberal thought—by today's standard were the most terrible racists. So the shifting moral zeitgeist is something that changes not just over the centuries but over decades.

I am genuinely curious about what it is in the air that changes. It seems to me to be a bit like Moore's law in computing, which is a definite mathematical straight line on a long scale in computer power. It's not due to any one thing; it's a composite of things that I think the shifting moral zeitgeist is the same, it is a composite of conversations at dinner parties, journalism, parliamentary/congress decisions, technological innovation, books. Everything moves on.

What do you think the role of atheism—or a challenge to the supremacy of religion—has been, if not as a kind of scientific theory of order, then a social or cultural theory of order?

Well, I think atheism is just sensible. If you look at polls in America and in Western Europe, the number of people who profess religion is steadily going down. There are more religious people in America than there are in the rest of Western Europe. But it is coming down. So that's part of the shifting zeitgeist.

Part of that has to do with books that you—or the colony of bacteria that are you—wrote. What do you see as the most convincing arguments that you advanced?

If you want to believe something, you've got to have reason to do so. It's rather better to say, "What are the most convincing arguments for theism?" And I'm not sure there are any. But, obviously, there are a lot that appear convincing to many people. The argument from design is probably the most powerful one.

In a way, you kind of advance a godless design with evolution, don't you? Everything is designed?

Yes, yes. Absolutely. It's an astonishingly powerful illusion of design. And it breaks down in certain places where there's bad design, like the vertebrate retina being backward, that kind of thing. But one of the things that I try to do in most of my books, actually, is to show how beautifully perfect the animals are. They really, really do look designed. I think this is probably why it took so long for a [Charles] Darwin to come on the scene. People just couldn't fathom the idea that it could come about through unconscious laws of physics.

Do you feel good that atheism, or maybe a better term is godlessness, is ascendant?

Yes, I do.

Despite not believing in God, you have called yourself a cultural Christian for at least a decade. What do you mean by that?

Nothing more than the fact that I was educated in Christian schools and a Christian society. It doesn't mean I'm sympathetic toward it, doesn't mean I believe it.

You have said that if you had to live in a Christian country or an Islamic country, you would pick the Christian country every time.

Yes, I would not wish to live in a country where the penalty for apostasy is death, and gay people are thrown off high buildings, and women are stoned to death for the crime of being raped.

There is an argument that liberal political philosophy, which allows for limited government, free speech, and open inquiry, has its roots in Christianity and the English Civil War. Part of the argument there was that the king did not have dominion over other men because we are all equal in front of God. I read a critique of you saying that you have been in the tree of Christianity and you've been sawing the branch off your whole time, and now by calling yourself a cultural Christian, you're in a way free riding on something. How do you respond?

Well, I'm rather sorry I said that thing about being a cultural Christian, because people have taken it to mean I'm sort of sympathetic toward the belief.

Now that thing about the society which lets science be free to do what it does being a Christian society, that's a matter for historians. And they might be right. It is possible that Christendom was the right breeding ground for science to arise in the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries. And your point about the English Civil War could be valid as well.

Research suggests, with obvious exceptions, that religiosity is declining. Religion has been a part of human history and civilization. Is there an issue that replaces it?

G.K. Chesterton is possibly wrongly thought to have said, "When men stop believing in religion, they believe in anything." It's rather a pessimistic view. I would like to think you believe in evidence. And I think it's rather demeaning to human nature to suggest that giving up one sort of nonsense, you've immediately got to go and seize on some other sort of nonsense.

What do you hope you will be remembered for? You are a palimpsest—you are writing over the work of previous scientists and thinkers. What is the message that sticks around long enough to influence people after you?

I suppose the message of The Selfish Gene: that natural selection chooses among immortal replicators, which happen to be genes on this planet. It will be the same principle, the Darwinian principle of the nonrandom survival of randomly varying, potentially immortal replicators.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.