He opened up the frontiers of science to a wide public and married one of Dr Who's assistants. But, as Colin Hughes finds, while banging the drum for his version of 'the truth' about evolution, he drowns out views that differ from his own

Saturday October 3, 1998

People frequently ask Richard Dawkins: "Why do you bother getting up in the morning if the meaning of life boils down to such a cruel pitiless fact, that we exist merely to help replicate a string of molecules?" As he puts it: "They say to me, how can you bear to be alive if everything is so cold and empty and pointless? Well, at an academic level I think it is - but that doesn't mean you can live your life like that. One answer is that I feel privileged to be allowed to understand why the world exists, and why I exist, and I want to share it with other people." Dawkins' new book, Unweaving The Rainbow, to be published later this month, is billed as an attempt to answer the 'why get up?' question, and indeed the first couple of chapters do just that, arguing that scientific discovery has a compelling, almost poetic impact on the imagination.

"It's about why I think science is one of the supreme things that makes life worth living," he says. "We are fantastically privileged to exist at all, but then we also have the privilege of understanding this beautiful world in which we find ourselves. that should make us all the more eager to soak up as much as we possibly can of understanding our world and our place in it before we die." Or, as the book puts it: "Mysteries do not lose their poetry when solved. Quite the contrary: the solution often turns out more beautiful than the puzzle... " In making this case Dawkins betrays all his rhetorical genius, and his faintly naive sense of everyday folk. He brilliantly berates those of us (all of us, probably) who succumb to the "anaesthetic of familiarity," by which he means allowing yourself to stop noticing that the world around you is coruscating with wonder. But he also shows how little he understands common humanity: "Just think," he enthuses, "instead of reading the football results you can read about distant galaxies!" As if one precludes the other.

When he expands in this way, hands clasped, leaning forward on a folding chair on the paved patio of his Oxford garden, he assumes a sparkling-eyed, boyish eagerness. This is his most appealing mode, in which it is easy to warm to his articulate, infectious absorption in his life's work - explaining and elaborating the potent truth of evolutionary theory. But it is also clear that he is capable of a dry chill, of a wincing, suck-toothed disdain. So far from suffering fools, he is capable of pouring a withering stream of scorn on the kind of woolly thinkers and wet-minded pseudo-religious fantasists who form the large phalanx of his opponents.

In fact, most of the new book is less about how science provides a meaning to life than about how Dawkins himself finds purpose in the continuing battle for the supremacy of searing scientific truth. Even when you're on his side, the tone sometimes feels unduly severe.

There lies the Dawkins paradox. Beginning with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which argues that life is simply a means of propagating DNA, with every creature ruthlessly determined to continue its own line, he has probably done more to focus lay intelligence on scientific truth in the past quarter century than any other individual, including Stephen Hawking, principally by writing with a compelling first-person directness. yet he is also capable of being peculiarly unengaging in person.

The man who writes and lectures so vividly that his images and ideas are indelibly printed on your mind, can be strangely remote. Why? Probably it's the combination of that maddening Oxford air of high intellectual superiority (in his case justified - he's a fellow of New College), attached to an acute personal sensitivity. However, people who know him say all this comes with a leavening of humour. John Krebs, head of the NERC and an old friend, says: "Some people see Richard as a relentlessly serious individual, without a lighter side. Actually he has a very well-developed sense of the ridiculous." He is one of those fortunate men in whom, despite catkin-white eyebrows and the greying hair of a 56-year-old, you can still see the face of his boyhood. He was born into a family of colonial forest officers, his grandfather in Burma, his father in Nyasaland - now Malawi - and then Kenya, which is where Clinton Richard was born in 1941, during the darkest days of the war. But if he modelled himself on any of them it was his uncle Colyear, a statistical biologist and fellow of St John's, Oxford, about whose lecturing Dawkins rhapsodizes: "I suppose I still subconsciously try to emulate his teaching style. He was quite stunning." When Richard was only seven his father unexpectedly inherited a farm near Chipping Norton and the family returned to England: not long after, Richard was sent to board at Oundle. Unusual among public schools at that time, Oundle had a self-consciously practical bent: boys were required to spend time making things in workshops.

You might expect in that atmosphere that Dawkins would storm at the natural sciences, replete with his family's long interest. In fact, he says, he felt no special enthusiasm at school for biology, and merely 'drifted' into that stream because of his family background. His biology teacher, Ioan Thomas, recalls: "He wasn't by any means a committed natural historian - it was rather a matter of wanting to be open-minded." The enthusiasm Dawkins really picked up at school was computing, and he recognises that his life-long fascination with programming has played a huge part in shaping his thought. The way computers think and operate is one of his dominant metaphors, and metaphor is his favourite tool.

The questioning mind was certainly there: according to Thomas, the boy was "alert and thoughtful enough" to realise that what he was learning in biology didn't tally with what he was being asked to imbibe at two compulsory Christian services every week. "I remember his housemaster ringing me up one Sunday evening, and I told him that 'requiring that young man to attend chapel every Sunday is doing him positive harm'." And though he didn't stand out as academically shining bright, he clearly had the determination to succeed: after A levels, preparing for Oxford entrance, Thomas told Dawkins' parents that their boy "might just scrape Oxford, but wasn't good enough to get into Balliol at this rate". Dawkins' 'rate' immediately shifted up a gear and he was accepted by Balliol.

Even at Oxford, though, there is a sense that he slipped into studying zoology, rather than being captivated. But it was a lucky step since the subject of animal behaviour threw him directly into his preferred habitat of speculative debate as opposed to laboratory experiment. He has, as he puts it, done his "fair share" of hard observation and experiment in his time.

But it's not the sight of teeming tropical jungle life or the wonderful weirdness of observed creatures that really grips him: "What really fascinates me is that they are all - plants twining round the trees, ants on the jungle floor, extraordinary salamanders - in their immensely complicated, enmeshed ways doing the same fundamental thing, which is propagating genes. It's the joy of understanding that appeals to me." The crucial relationship at Oxford was with Niko Tinbergen, Dutch-born Nobel prize-winning ethologist, of whom Dawkins says he felt in awe: "He loved my essays, and said flattering things about them, and that encouraged me to do a DPhil, clearly a turning point in my life." One of Tinbergen's central contentions was that animal and plant bodies could be viewed as 'survival machines', an idea that played a key part in fertilising Dawkins' selfish gene metaphor. But his post-doctoral work set off in what he calls "mathematical directions" - actually constructing a model for interpreting decision-making in animals.

George Barlow, of the University of California, Berkeley, spotted Dawkins at an international ethological conference in Rennes in 1967. "I was stunned by the stellar performance of someone so new on the scene, and relatively unknown. He had the audience in the palm of his hand. His topic? A relatively esoteric problem of how best to determine the colour a chick preferred." The highlight, Barlow recalls, was Dawkins' demonstration of a little box chicken he had built, which electronically duplicated the way the chick distributed pecks. "He brought the house down. I figured if he could make such an abstract and potentially deadly dull question so fascinating, he was certainly going to make his mark." Barlow later that year offered him a job as an assistant professor. He tells how Dawkins, in his acceptance letter, pointed out tongue in cheek that his "great-great something or other was General Clinton who fought against the Americans in the War of Independence, and he hoped we could forgive him." Just before leaving for Berkeley Dawkins married for the first time, a researcher called Marian Stamp, so when they arrived in California (where the Barlows put them up initially) they were on honeymoon. Barlow recalls putting them in a corridor bedroom through which his daughters trooped at all hours: "Some honeymoon!" The young couple became close to Barlow's children: "It was Richard's first exposure to peanut butter and jelly sandwiches - he had the girls in stitches because he ate them with a knife and fork." Barlow's recollections also illustrate the kind of youthful intensity of the couple - how they set their clocks ahead an hour so that they would get up earlier and be more productive, and how Marian loaded Richard's razor with different blades in a blind experiment so that he could find out which brand was best without fear of bias. The picture is of a young, reserved man with a somewhat eccentric and slightly unworldly sense of humour, but also of phenomenal curiosity and intelligence, growing up in that late 1960s era of Buckminster Fuller radicalism and Vietnam protest.

When he first published The Selfish Gene its message was widely misunderstood to imply that human society is driven solely by the 'me' motive. Dawkins found himself interpreted far and wide as the intellectual apologist for self-seeking, anti-society Thatcherite economics. In fact his political instincts have always been on the liberal left: he worked for Eugene McCarthy's presidential campaign, and joined anti-war marches.

He came home from Berkeley to New College, Oxford, a hard-working, committed and quietly ambitious scientist. Dawkins resumed his connection with Tinbergen, along with his computational approach to ethology. But then a vengeful technician sabotaged the computer records where Dawkins worked, making it temporarily hard for his research to continue. Then the country was forced into a three-day working week: the consequent 1974 power cuts left Dawkins unable to keep up his lab work. He started using the free time to write a book about neo-Darwinist ideas which was eventually published as The Selfish Gene.

Even now, re-reading it a quarter century on, the book's immediacy is still gripping. No wonder so many fellow scientists are sneeringly jealous of Dawkins' writing talent. It is bland and inadequate to say merely that he can express complex abstract ideas in easily comprehensible language. Dawkins is far more potent than your everyday populariser. The book's polemical spell is mesmeric: the prose compels not only your attention, but also your acceptance. It is little wonder that Selfish Gene changed the way people think. It even changed many lives.

Ever since, of course, the great debate in the scientific world has been over how original the ideas really were. Even at the time prominent supporters of Dawkins, such as John Maynard Smith and Bill Hamilton, said that Dawkins' drawing together of ideas - like those developed by the British geneticists RA Fisher and JBS Haldane, and the American, Sewall Wright, since the 1920s and 1930s - led to original strands of thought, even in the Selfish Gene itself. But there were vicious critics, notably the Harvard scientist Richard Lewontin who reviewed the book scathingly in Nature.

John Krebs says: "Richard has interpreted and explained the ideas of neo-Darwinism with unique clarity, force and elegance. He has also explored the consequences of extending these ideas into new domains. Often the creators of the core ideas will themselves read Richard's work and say, 'Gosh, I never thought of it in those terms', or 'I hadn't realised that one could deduce such and such from my starting point'." Professor Pat Bateson, provost of King's College, Cambridge, who has known Dawkins since their early twenties, has absolutely no doubt that his image for thinking about evolution really helped several generations of students and the lay public to think about evolution: "You can take any young biologist and they will say when they read Dawkins it all suddenly became clear. His extraordinary ability to use metaphors really brought the subject alive for people." But Bateson thinks any portrayal of Dawkins as "merely a populariser" is worse than cheap, it is actually wrong. "There are aspects of his thinking which go much deeper," he argues. The final chapter of Dawkins' book The Extended Phenotype contains what Bateson regards as a "very interesting and original" speculation about how development itself might have evolved - one of the trickier issues in evolution theory.

Michael Rodgers, who edited Selfish Gene and most of Dawkins' subsequent books, says while Dawkins has a sense of humour and a nice infectious laugh he is "an evangelist, and takes that side very seriously". After the book was published letters poured in from readers thanking Dawkins for opening their minds. Some told Rodgers that they had decided to study biology in consequence.

"One academic I talked to at the time criticised it for being too well written. Students, he said, would be seduced, ditch their critical faculties and believe it presented 'the truth'." The irony, of course, is that Dawkins frankly does regard his understanding of natural selection as the truth - a truth that is "beautiful in its power".

Rodgers says: "Thirty years ago there was in the UK a real anti-science feeling, and it was respectable to parade an ignorance of science. That's changed, and I think Richard can be credited in no small measure with helping to bring that about." Dawkins makes absolutely no attempt to claim a grand achievement for himself. "The image of the selfish gene enabled me to understand the ideas, and that helped other people understand it too. I was saying no more than RA Fisher said in 1930." The modesty is both beguiling and infuriating. Partly it's just the way Oxford dons are, always countering a speculative query with the apology that they don't really know enough about the subject, when in fact they are 100 times better placed to discuss it than you are. It's not as disconcerting, though, as his bristling discomfort with difficult personal questions, which leaves you feeling that he struggles to grasp how other people view him. He is sharply defensive about some areas of his private life - areas which probably say more about him than anything he has ever written or said about himself.

In his book Climbing Mount Improbable, Dawkins recalls how he asked his six-year-old daughter, Juliet, what flowers were for. She answered, not unreasonably given her age, that the purpose of flowers was to give us beautiful things to look at, and honey for the bees. Gently, her dad disabused her.

Since so much of the delight in reading Dawkins is his thrill at uncovering the elaborate wonders of the natural world (unravelling the byzantine relationships between figs and their co-dependent wasps, for instance), you wonder how having a child has affected him - perhaps enabling him to see the world through a child's eyes? After all, his Royal Institution Faraday lectures for children were a great success, captivating a young audience as expertly as a stage conjuror might.

Instead of leading him into reflections on children and childhood, the question makes Dawkins tense up and withdraw: "I don't see that much of her, to my enormous regret. I only see her alternate weekends. You're so busy trying to make sure the weekend is a success, and that things don't go badly wrong, you don't have the luxury of exploring those other things." Anyone who lives apart from their children can recognise those difficult feelings. And it is also clear that Dawkins adores his only daughter.

About Lalla Ward, his third wife, Dawkins talks very happily indeed. She is the pretty former Dr Who sidekick Romana, but he hastens to say that she played more serious parts too, such as Ophelia in the BBC's Hamlet. They met at a party held by Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (which Dawkins loves) and a former Dr Who scriptwriter ("apparently his scripts were a cut above the others", says Dawkins, loyally). Lalla has since drawn excellent sketches for Dawkins' books.

Their home is just off the Banbury Road, in one of those huge old north Oxford houses next to the university parks, that you approach by one of two gaps in a wall, scrunching over gravel through which bits of grass grow tastefully but not too tidily around the edges. To the right of the front door is Dawkins' office, usually inhabited by his assistant Ingrid, and a neat cluster of desks, PCs, printers and fax machines (everything to do with Dawkins is orderly). To the left is a long sitting room decorated by an electric piano on one corner (for Juliet to practice on), and Lalla's famed collection of fairground carousel horses, inherited from her mother.

Straight through and you walk into a large garden that would naturally be described as 'country', except that you're within sprinting distance from Oxford city centre. There's an indoor pool on one flank of the paved patio, and a vast slab of Purbeck stone propped up as an outside table on the other. "It's the same stone as they used for those heads around the Sheldonian theatre," says Dawkins.

Life is obviously now very comfortable, presumably in part because of the endowment from Charles Simonyi, one of Bill Gates' Microsoft millionaires, who funded the chair of professor for the public understanding of science that Dawkins is the first to hold. The new job led him to write Unweaving the Rainbow. He felt obliged to lay out his credo, his reason for believing it important that non-specialists should have at least some grasp of what's known at the frontiers of science. But Dawkins carries so much baggage that it is impossible for him to write such a book without resuming the fierce diatribes against religion, or sardonic attacks on other evolutionists who he regards as misguided, which in great measure now define his public persona.

One of those battles is with Stephen Jay Gould, a warm and appealing American paleontologist who also writes with great panache about evolution, and whose books have hugely influenced both lay and scientific readers in the United States.

Many of Dawkins' friends think he should just let this argument lie, since, in their view, the difference is a relatively minor one centering on whether evolution occurred in a smooth and steady progression, or underwent periods of accelerated development interspersed with periods of comparative stagnation.

Dawkins accepts it is perfectly possible that evolutionary change moved faster at some times than others, but is driven to steely outrage by what he sees as the manipulation of fossil evidence to suggest that vast numbers of species sprang into existence in tiny periods of geological time.

Why does it bother Dawkins so much? Because, whereas many scientists are content for lay people merely to have a rough grasp of what's going on, Dawkins wants them to get it right. The truth matters. He cannot bear to see flabby writing (which is essentially what he accuses Gould of) lead people into a misunderstanding.

John Krebs says: "I think this is a lot of fuss about not very much. Although it is sometimes presented in the press as a fundamental disagreement about the role of Darwinism in evolution, I don't think it is anything of the sort. It is partly a matter of emphasis, and partly a matter of salesmen staking out their territories." But it matters to Dawkins because he fears that Gould gives people an excuse to doubt natural selection altogether: if species can suddenly spring into existence, perhaps God gave evolution a helping hand? No extrapolation could be better calculated to drive Dawkins into a fury of contention. At one point Dawkins said although Gould was a good writer "that makes him all the more damaging - people assume his ideas are scientific truths". Gould struck back: "It is not just a question of Dawkins' argument being inadequate. It's wrong." Many of Dawkins' friends worry that his militant atheism and evangelistic fervour damage not only his personal reputation, but also the scientific cause.

As Rodgers says: "Some academics, not necessarily believers, think it does harm to the public image of science when he suggests that science has, or will get, all the answers." But if that's what he passionately believes, surely that's what he should passionately say? George Barlow says that among the creationists of America (where some school boards came close to banning Darwinian textbooks), Dawkins is regarded as 'evil incarnate'. Dawkins talks more warily about religion now, which suggests that he has taken his friends' concern to heart. But it's more a question of his struggling (against his nature) to be more diplomatic in framing his argument. He hasn't changed his mind at all. In conversation, he emphasises how much he enjoys engaging with clerics on the issue of creation and natural selection, and makes it plain that the argument seems to him immensely important.

Asked if he finds believers actively objectionable, he says: "Not at all. In fact I find them interesting, because at least they're asking the right questions. They're just coming up with the wrong answer. What I can't understand is those people, particularly scientists, who say that you can put these matters into two separate compartments." The sharp logician in him won't allow a fellow scientist to believe two contradictory truths: he gave me a recent survey showing that scientists who believe in God are not only small in number but also dwindling, a discovery which hugely satisfies him.

If you were brave you'd speculate that middle age and his third wife have tempered Dawkins' demeanour. He delights in music, literature, all the normal pleasures of cultured humanity. The new book contains more personal reference than all his other books put together. But it also gives the strong impression that this intensely sensitive man is reacting to the long-standing criticism that he has only ever had one thing to say: after all, every book until now has been an elaboration on the The Selfish Gene's original theme. So now, at 57, he's exploring somewhere else.

But why should the criticism bother him? He may only ever have written about one question but of all questions it's arguably the biggest and the best - what are we, why are we here, where did we come from? Dawkins deeply believes he found the answer 30 years ago, and he wants you to know that it awes him still.

The only problem with this laudable ambition is that his talent does not really lie in winning people over with charm; it lies in cutting through comfortable illusions to expose the motiveless reality of life. And the plain fact is, some people cannot bear too much reality.

Unweaving The Rainbow is published by Penguin Press/Allen Lane on October 22, price £20.

Useful links
The Third Culture
When Religion Steps on Science's Turf by Richard Dawkins
Richard Dimbleby Lecture given by Richard Dawkins in 1996
The world of Richard Dawkins (unofficial website)