Richard Dawkins Wins in the End

“Admirably, Dawkins continually made it clear that his objective was to promote a clear understanding of the world as discovered through the scientific method, and if scientific facts caused offense with anyone, then so be it.”

For much of my life, merely hearing the name “Richard Dawkins” made my blood boil. Growing up as a Christian, Dawkins was the embodiment of evil, flooding the world with dangerous ideas about evolution and naturalism. Worse still, he was smug about it. With his quick wit and highfalutin Oxford accent, he was a Hollywood archetype of the brilliant professor. It is hard to express how much this irked me.

But that was decades ago. I have changed. The world has changed, a lot.

Last week, I reflected on the magnitude of this change while sitting at the top of Dolores Park in San Francisco. A soft orange light blossomed around the city’s skyline. Moments later, a dreamy, violet haze settled in as the sun sank into the Pacific. I was a long, long way from the small town where I grew up. Picking up my phone, I clicked on the Waymo app and summoned a driverless taxi to pick me up and drive me to the Masonic Auditorium, where Richard Dawkins was about to speak as part of his final tour in America. I could not imagine trying to describe any of this to a younger version of myself.

At the event, Dawkins took the stage to a standing ovation. Michael Shermer, the publisher of the magazine Skeptic, facilitated the conversation with Dawkins. Shermer began the discussion by holding up a copy of Dawkins’s new release, The Genetic Book of the Dead. Shermer advertised it as a “bookend” to Dawkins’s first work, The Selfish Gene, which was first published in 1976. Dawkins replied that he had not thought of it that way, but, yes, he liked the idea of it as a bookend to his early work.