By THE NEW YORK TIMES, SARAH LYALL
Added: Sun, 18 Oct 2009 23:00:00 UTC

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/books/20dawkins.html?pagewanted=1&8dpc&_r=1

LONDON — It won’t thrill his publishers to hear this, but Richard Dawkins appears largely uninterested in standard authorial topics like his new book, his writing habits or even himself. Instead he wants to talk about giant butterflies and tiny moths, worms disguised as snakes, why goats are related to whales and whether beetles have two sets of wings (they do, and for good reason).

What better place to do it than at the Darwin Center at the Natural History Museum here, a glossy new temple to the evolutionary process, or the “ee-volutionary proh-cess,” as Mr. Dawkins pronounces it in his precise accent. In a sign of the felicitous juxtaposition of person and place, the man dispensing tickets at the front desk recognizes this shortish man with the chronically interested expression.

“Mr. Dawkins?” he says, as pleased as if he had spotted Jacques Cousteau striding down the beach. “I love your books.”

If there were a celebrity of the evolutionary world, Mr. Dawkins would certainly be it. His best-selling books — including “The Selfish Gene” and “The Blind Watchmaker,” laying out his case for a gene-centered view of evolution — have gone a long way toward making evolutionary biology accessible to a wide audience.

He lectures to sell-out audiences, receives standing ovations and regularly places in the Top 10 on Prospect magazine’s annual list of the world’s 100 Top Public Intellectuals. His latest book, “The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution” (Free Press), has been on the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list for three weeks.

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TAGGED: BOOKS, REVIEWS, RICHARD DAWKINS