![]() ![]() Or rather as much of a nothing as before we were born.” He recites Mark Twain’s famous line: “I do not fear death. What will happen after he draws his last breath? “It will be just like being unborn,” he says evenly. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.” “We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. The eulogy he has chosen for his funeral – the opening lines of his 1998 book, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and Appetite for Wonder – goes to the heart of his secular, science-based world view. His patrician accent and measured speech seem ill-suited to overt displays of emotion, although certain lines of poetry can move him to tears.Īge has not softened his beliefs or rather his lack of belief in a higher power don’t expect a deathbed apostasy. He has been married three times, but spent lockdown with a new partner. Dressed in an untucked white shirt and blue Prince of Wales check trousers, he is handsome in a donnish way, but reticent, almost shy. The latter book – a sensation on its release – uses science to argue belief in God, any god, is not just wrong, but potentially dangerous.ĭawkins is 81. The former puts the gene at the centre of the evolutionary process and argues that organisms – you and I, for example - are merely vehicles for successful genes, the kind whose coded information remains largely unchanged over tens of millions of years. ![]() His bestselling books, The Selfish Gene (1976) and The God Delusion (2006), represent a formidable one-two punch. His ambivalence in regard to his musical talent contrasts with the certainty he exhibits in his life’s work: the study of evolutionary biology and the forensic debunking of religion. The novelist Alexander McCall Smith has founded something called The Really Terrible Orchestra. “I’m trying to get better.” Would he like to play with other musicians? “I think I would. He takes the instrument from his lips and shrugs off a compliment. For a moment, I imagine him as The Pied Piper of Atheism calling the (un)faithful to his side. He plays the theme from Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf and the melody fills the sunlit living room of his Oxford apartment. ![]() He pushes a button and it imitates the sound of a cello another button turns it into a saxophone. Richard Dawkins is perched on the edge of his sofa playing his Electronic Wind Instrument (EWI), a kind of digital clarinet. ![]()
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