By VEJA MAGAZINE
Added: Wed, 08 Jul 2009 23:00:00 UTC

Original PDF in Portuguese
Translation by Eli Vieira and proofread by Layla Nasreddin.
by Jerônimo Teixeira, from Pirenópolis



The Englishman Richard Dawkins was drawn to biology intrigued by the great questions about the origin of life. He has become the greatest modern spokesman for Darwinism and a militant atheist. In Brazil for the first time, he even attempted to apply his naturalist side.

Richard Dawkins interrupts the interview and points his finger to the sky, where a flock of noisy birds are flying about. "Look there! Parrots!" Sober, rigorous in his answers, Dawkins sometimes shows himself to be sarcastic – particularly when he attacks his favourite target, religion – but he is not exactly a demonstrative person. His almost childlike enthusiasm for parrots and toucans – fauna he obviously cannot find at home in Oxford – may be credited to the fascination towards nature which the author conveys so well in books such as Climbing Mount Improbable and the recent The Ancestor's Tale, published in Brazil by Companhia das Letras. Dawkins, however, says he did not become a biologist because he loved animals or plants.

"I must confess I have never been a great naturalist. I have developed it through the years. My initial motivation for the study of biology was philosophical,” he says. His curiosity was aimed at what he calls "great questions": Why does life exist? How did it appear on Earth? And his answers come from a fundamental source: the thought of Charles Darwin (this one, by contrast, a born naturalist). Dawkins, 68 years old, is the greatest spokesperson for Darwinism today. But he did more than just "popularise" modern biology: since his spectacular debut with The Selfish Gene, in 1976, Dawkins has been, and this is no exaggeration, consolidating a new worldview.

Dawkins spent two weeks in Brazil. He was honoured at the meeting of the Animal Behaviour Society, which gathered researchers from 23 countries in Pirenópolis from 22 to 26 June. From there he went on a three-day trip to the Pantanal (a wetland in the extreme west of Brazil), together with other researchers who also attended the meeting. He came back marvelling at the diversity of life. "The variety of birds is spectacular. I was lucky I was accompanied by several ornithologists. I am no bird specialist," he says. Last Thursday, the day before he flew back to England, he was in Paraty to take part in a discussion about The God Delusion, his anti-religion book.

At the hotel where the ABS conference took place, Dawkins was seen constantly in the lobby, bending over his Apple notebook. He attended the lectures assiduously and attentively – he was excited after he left the University of California's Marlene Zuk's lecture about the rapid evolution of Hawaii crickets. "I studied these crickets myself in the 70's. But my research didn't yield great results," he says. The invitation for the Animal Behaviour conference gave Dawkins the chance to reconnect himself with the subject with which he began his studies in biology at Oxford at the beginning of the 60's as a student with the Dutch ethologist Niko Tinbergen, winner of the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1973. In later decades, however, he moved away from pure research in order to dedicate himself to the popularisation of science. Now retired, Dawkins held, from 1995 to 2008, the first Charles Simonyi professorship for the public understanding of science, a chair established at Oxford by a donation from the Hungarian-American Charles Simonyi, Microsoft's ex-executive and programmer. "I'm sort of an ambassador for science," Dawkins says.

Dawkins's books have always contained criticisms of religion (especially of creationists). But this crusade against faith has turned into the focal point of his activities since the publication of The God Delusion in 2006. The scientist has supported the campaign which put up advertisements on London’s famous red buses that said, "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life." Always combative, the biologist does not accept any compromise that reserves distinct places for science and religion. "Unlike what many people claim, the two fields do overlap. The religious view of the universe, the idea that the universe has a creator – it is, in its way, a scientific theory, though a wrong one," he says. In Dawkins's view, therefore, promoting atheism is also a way to further his main mission: popularising science. But he is growing resentful about the controversial fame that this attack against God has given him. He regrets, for instance, that journalists generally only ask him questions about this subject.

Indeed, some people started seeing him as a maverick for a negative cause – the man who says no to God and religion. It was in this role that he was satirised, three years ago, in the always caustic cartoon South Park (his response was witty: he complained about the horrid imitation of a British accent by the actor who dubbed his animated version). Dawkins has only one positive message: the theory of evolution, unveiled by Charles Darwin in his classic 1859 book The Origin of Species. In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins found a unique way to convey the deep meaning of this process. He saw natural selection from the point of view of its basic unit, the gene. Living creatures, he argued, are nothing more than vehicles for the replication of genes by means of reproduction. This is, even today, the basic perspective of evolutionary psychology, which seeks to explain the behaviour of animals (including humans) on Darwinian grounds. "There has never been a science book like The Selfish Gene," wrote author Ian McEwan on the occasion of the book's 30th anniversary. "It triggered a gigantic change in the theory about evolution, and at the same time enticed the layman, without being condescending, and with style."

Dawkins's revolutionary point of view wasn't immediately accepted fully in the scientific arena. Superficial readers have criticised the supposed "genetic determinism" of the author. The attack against Dawkins and other biologists who did similar work – such as Edward O. Wilson at Harvard – was more ideological than strictly scientific. Left-wing critics like the geneticist Richard Lewontin, the neuroscientist Steven Rose and the palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould displayed an automatic aversion to any suggestion that human behaviour could be influenced by genetics. "I have never understood why claiming that environmental influence surpasses that of genes was so important for Marxists. Maybe it has something to do with the belief that the human being can always be perfected," Dawkins says. The Selfish Gene at last established itself as a fundamental reference work for modern biology – and it has been followed by eight other elegant and absorbing books setting forth his explanation of evolution (a new book, The Greatest Show on Earth, is to be published this year).

His description of life from the point of view of the gene may suggest a hard and disenchanted materialism. The final lesson, however, is about a radical humanism: the human being is the only one capable of rebelling against the tyranny of their genes. "Whenever we use contraception, we are contradicting the Darwinian imperative of reproduction. And we do it in many other ways," Dawkins says. An orthodox Darwinist, Dawkins could repeat in any of his books the famous statement with which Charles Darwin ended The Origin of Species: "There is grandeur in this view of life.”

Image captions (see original PDF):

“Birds in the Pantanal
Richard Dawkins: an almost childish enthusiasm for parrots and toucans”

“The man who says no
The animated version of Dawkins in South Park: caustic satire and a horrid British accent”

“No reconciliation
Dawkins at the door of an atheist campaign bus: he thinks Charles Darwin’s (below) theory of evolution is incompatible not only with creationism, but with any other religious idea”

TAGGED: RICHARD DAWKINS, SCIENCE