Volume 18 | Issue 12 | 15 | Jun. 21, 2004
Richard Dawkins
Amid stacks of books in the front room of his house near
Oxford University, writer and evolutionist Richard Dawkins
points to a piece of memorabilia: A replica of the
Australopithecus africanus skull known as "Mrs. Ples," a
gift to him from a 1997 lecture in South Africa. Dawkins,
who spent the first two years of his life in East Africa,
still remembers the whitewashed huts his parents built near
the Mbagathi River, a scene he calls his private Eden. "On a
larger scale, Africa is Eden to us all," he writes.
For Dawkins, such metaphors are the basis of what he
considers his gift to science: retelling the story of
evolution in words that both inspire and instruct. Since
publishing The Selfish Gene in 1976,2 Dawkins, 63, has won
numerous honors for his work, and was named a fellow of the
Royal Society of Literature in 1997. Today, as Charles
Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at
Oxford, he has become one of biology's most prominent
polemicists and poets.
Read the interview at The Scientist the-the-Open ↗
scientist.com/yr2004/jun/upfront5_040621.html
Posted by Robert Karl Stonjek.