Last Updated: 12:01am BST 02/08/2008
Richard Dawkins tells Andrew Pettie how Charles Darwin went from a man bound for the clergy to the writer of one of the world’s most controversial books – On the Origin of Species
It is almost 150 years since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, a treatise which, according to Professor Richard Dawkins, contained ‘the most powerful idea ever to occur to a human mind: the idea of evolution by natural selection’. It would probably startle Darwin to know that, despite overwhelming scientific evidence in his theory’s favour, only four out of 10 Britons currently believe it to be true. Dawkins, a fearless crusader for rationalism and the author of The God Delusion and The Selfish Gene, sounds baffled by this statistic.
‘It’s bewildering,’ he says, ‘and an indictment of our education system. Most children are taught evolution at the age of 15. It should be taught much earlier than that because it’s so incredibly important and interesting: it’s the explanation of why we all exist.’
n the opening episode of Dawkins’s three-part documentary series, The Genius of Charles Darwin, he asks a group of schoolchildren what they think of the theory of evolution. Many insist, despite Dawkins’s patient explanation of the scientific evidence to the contrary, that the world was created in the manner described by the Bible or the Qur’an. ‘I found it rather depressing,’ says Dawkins, ‘when the children said, “It says this in my holy book and so this is what I believe.” I asked them why they believed a holy book rather than the evidence and they said it was the way they’d been brought up, as though that in itself was a self-evidently knockdown argument.’
Although Dawkins doesn’t think that believing in evolution precludes people from believing in God, he says that ‘a full understanding of the world of evolution does tend to push against religion.’
This was certainly the case in Darwin’s own life. Before his life-changing voyage working as a naturalist aboard HMS Beagle, Darwin was destined for a career in the clergy. What he saw during the Beagle’s five-year journey round the globe to chart the coastline of South America, which began in 1831, forced Darwin to question biblical creationism and, in turn, his own faith.
‘Darwin didn’t have a sudden moment when he lost his faith,’ says Dawkins, ‘it gradually dropped away, partly because of personal tragedies in his life which made him feel that there wasn’t a benevolent god. But there was also an awareness that natural selection was an extremely cruel and ruthless process. He once said that he found it hard to conceive how a beneficent creator could have knowingly created a species of wasp with the habit of laying its eggs inside the living bodies of caterpillars, which then hatch out and eat the caterpillar while it’s still alive.’
Thankfully, mankind is now largely protected from the most callous extremes of natural selection. ‘We live a rather featherbedded life,’ says Dawkins. ‘We have clothes, we have central heating, we have a roof over our heads. Most of our ancient ancestors’ contemporaries died young, without reproducing. So it’s true that the cutting edge of natural selection has largely been withdrawn. But I would hate to say that this was a bad thing; I’m all for doctors and medical science and so on.’
In the second episode, Dawkins examines some infamous attempts to use Darwin’s theory of natural selection to justify social engineering among humans. ‘There was a time in the first part of the 20th century when it was fashionable for certain intellectuals to bemoan the deterioration of the human race but that all came to an end with Hitler, because people saw what ghastly results can follow from social Darwinism.’
Ever since he first published On the Origin of Species, Darwin’s theories have sparked great controversy and, at times, conflict. However the man himself couldn’t have been less bullish about his discoveries. ‘Darwin was an immensely gentle man, as well as a gentleman,’ says Dawkins. ‘He felt wounded by adverse criticism of his work but was not at all combative. He left the fighting for his theory to others.’
Darwin could barely have found a more committed and persuasive advocate of his work than Dawkins. As well his polemical documentary series, Dawkins is currently hard at work on a new book, to be published next year, which outlines the hard evidence for Darwin’s theory.
‘I’ve written eight books on evolution,’ he says, ‘but none of them has laid out the positive evidence for it. I begin with the domestication of animals, as Darwin did, because it’s a pretty powerful demonstration of what natural selection can achieve. When you consider that a Pekinese, a poodle and a Yorkshire terrier are all modified wolves, and that those modifications have taken place in a matter of centuries, think what can be achieved in a million years, 10 million years or 100 million years.’
· The Genius of Charles Darwin is on Channel 4 on Monday at 8.00pm
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/08/02/nosplit/bvtvsunfeat02.xml
