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
http://www.the-scientist.com/yr2004/jun/upfront5_040621.html

Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek.
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