The Freethinker interviews Richard Dawkins

I don't know the nature of The Freethinker, but it appears to be a rationalist and humanistic venue. I don't care about its politics because the article in question is an interview with Richard Dawkins. The interviewer is simply called "Freethinker."

Many people here follow Richard, so I will highlight a few intriguing questions and answers in the interview. Click on the following links to read the Q&As.

This is included in the introduction.

On his sitting room wall, I spotted two paintings that seemed somehow familiar. They turned out to be by Desmond Morris, the zoologist and surrealist painter; the larger one was The Expectant Valley, which served as the cover for the first edition of The Selfish Gene (1976). Dawkins later acquired them from the artist.

The painting is to the right.

‘Please focus on the science in your write-up rather than the politics,’ he said as I was leaving, ‘it’s more interesting.’ But that is the risk of being a public intellectual with a Twitter account: humans are an odd species, and with all the scientific insight in the world, it is hard to predict which ideas will do best in the meme pool. We leave readers to judge for themselves.

The job of the interviewer is to illuminate someone. The interview does a creditable job, but concentrates too much on social media and on meme, as it hasn't explained much There are a few parts of the interview that caught my attention.

Dawkins gives an explanation of The Selfish Gene. It's a great summary.

Freethinker: In a nutshell, how would you sum up the book’s thesis?

Dawkins: Natural selection is the differential survival of genes in gene pools. Individual organisms can be seen as survival machines for the genes that ride inside them. When an individual dies, its genes die with it. If it dies before it reproduces, they really do die. Individuals are descended from an unbroken line of successful ancestors, where ‘successful’ means that they reproduced and their descendants therefore inherit the genes that made them successful. That is what makes living creatures such good survival machines for the genes inside them.

So when you look at an animal and ask why it does what it does, the answer is, for the good of its genes. Genes are ‘selfish’ in the sense that they look after their own self-preservation. Individuals do not – they are not selfish, or not necessarily. They may be driven to be selfish by the selfish genes, but the selfish genes may equally well drive them to be altruistic. The ways in which individuals work for the survival of their genes is dependent upon their ecology, and they may do it up trees or underground, or in water or in deserts. They may be predators or prey, parasites or hosts. But it is all fundamentally about the same thing, which is preserving the genes into the distant future.

The subject of more questions than any other, "Freethinker" refers to a word Richard came up with as a "unit of culture." Cultural or psychological selection can spread or not spread the meme. Dawkins says that religion is a particularly invidious meme since it spreads both horizontally. Religion is a very successful meme because children are identified by their religion and we don't speak of a "Republican child"

I don't want to talk about why I think meme hasn't been as successful as I would have liked. Richard thinks that the idea has been fruitful, but that there are some difficulties with it. You can read my review of Susan Blackmore's book on the meme machine in 1999 in Nature.

I don't do movements.

Freethinker: Looking back on the New Atheist movement in the 2000s, what was the high point of that for you?

Dawkins: I don’t do movements. I suppose when four books came out within a couple of years of each other: The God Delusion, Sam Harris’ End of Faith, Dan Dennett’s Breaking the Spell and Christopher Hitchens’s God is Not Great. By coincidence – there was not a conspiracy or anything. That might have been a high point.

It is part of an interviewer's job but it is naive and trivial to ask about it. The question is a "gotcha" This is one of the things that is included in the whole interview. I think Richard's writing is "passionate". The first part of Dawkins's response was given by me.

Freethinker: As a writer who has done a lot to popularise many areas of science, your style has been compelling and vivid, but often polemical. Why did you choose to write in this way?

Dawkins: I am not sure I see it as polemical. It is certainly read as polemical by religious readers. . , ,

All critiques of religion are seen as polemical. If you want to shut down discussion, you should call a critic a critic. Mencken is a good place to start if you want to see real arguments.

Dawkins gives good answers on accommodating and humanism.

Freethinker: People can be inconsistent, and believe incompatible things at the same time. But logically speaking, is it possible to be scientific and religious?

Dawkins: Many people are, but I am not sure whether that falls under the heading of logic. I suppose I have to say it is possible, yes. You could say the universe is such a mysterious place that it would be foolish to be over-confident one way or the other about whether some monster intelligence lies behind it. That would be, for me, bending over backwards an awful long way. It is very hard to be a logical theist.

Freethinker: Would you describe yourself as a humanist?

Dawkins: My only hesitation in describing myself as a humanist would be that it implies giving too much of a privilege to the human species as opposed to other species. I would like to call myself a ‘sentientist’ or something like that – with a moral regard for sentient awareness. A large part of that would be human, but no doubt there are other animals that are capable of feeling pain and suffering something like the way we are. With that reservation, I would call myself a humanist.

Richard was asked about the American Humanist Association revoking his Humanist of the Year Award, and he was also asked what his views were on the debate over gender identity. He wasn't expecting Dawkins to become a transphobe. It is possible to read Richard's answer for yourself.

There are two more pieces.

Freethinker: Over the course of your long career, what is the achievement of which you are proudest?

Dawkins: My second book, The Extended Phenotype (1982), about the visible manifestations of genes, because it has the most of me in it, and the most original thought. It is aimed at professionals rather than lay people, although lay people can enjoy it.

Richard has replied to this question many times. The book is the hardest to read and the most original, and I have read it many times. He is proudest of this because he feels the same way about Speciation. Speciation, also written for professionals, is the proudest book I have written. From time to time, I feel like I'm dying when I read that book. I could think a lot then. I don't think I can write it now, but I was at the right age to do so and my mental faculties hadn't yet begun their decline.

If you combine literary quality with scientific explanation, Richard's novel The Blind Watchmaker is the best. Some of the prose is so beautiful that it makes a scientist cry. Those who think that Richard is a journalist or not a scientist should read The ExtendedPhenotype.

The discussion moves to Dawkins's next book.

Freethinker: What projects are you working on at the moment?

Dawkins: I am working on a new book called The Genetic Book of the Dead, which is aimed at the same kind of audience as The Selfish Gene. Its thesis is that an animal is a description of ancient worlds, of an ancestral world in which its genes are naturally selected. A sufficiently knowledgeable zoologist of the future should be able to pick up an unknown animal and read it as a description of a palimpsest of ancestral worlds in which its ancestors were naturally selected.

That is an original idea of Richard and a good one. I would have drilled deeper into this answer as a Biologist. How can you be certain that you can read environments from the past? Don't you have to know a lot about genetics to start something like this? A clue that we are descended from fish and that our ancestors lived in water is the development of gill slits. How do you know which bits of the DNA give rise to the gill slit? How do you know if the ancestors lived in fresh or salty water? We have genes from extinct and unknown ancestors that lived in unknown environments, but what can we do to reconstruct those ancestors and their environments? I would like to see an example.

The fossil record and a good phylogeny can answer some questions, but I don't think it's a good idea to sequence DNA to find out how the environment affected an organisms ancestors. A lot of the past information is lost when a document is changed millions of times.

I would have liked to ask Richard about the things that he said were transphobia andpolemic style. I would love to have this as part of a public conversation onstage, which I have had the honor of having with Dawkins. I anticipate that the book will interest me. I don't know anything about the upcoming book.

Daniel.