Articles

From both  left and right, we are assaild by the pernicious doctrine that truth is what you feel it to be, rather than what the scientific evidence shows. The Richard Dawkins Foundation stands for objective science and reason as the only way of knowing what is true about the real world.

This is an old book review. But I think its relevance to the fashionable nonsense that surrounds us today will be obvious.

This tribute to Professor Wilson on his death was published in Skeptical Inquirer along with other memorial statements by Steven Pinker, Sean B Carroll and the Editor, Kendrick Frazier.

This is my highly critical review of E O Wilson's book, The Social Conquest of Earth. It originally appeared in Prospect magazine, June 2012, and was repeated in Books do Furnish a Life.

It should be read in conjunction with my tribute to him on his death.

My contribution to Why We Read – 70 Writers on Non-Fiction

"My body my choice" will cut no ice with a pro-"life" advocate who believes an embryo is a baby and abortion is murder. We have to persude them that their belief is mistaken.

This is the text of an artricle published online by Free Inquiry: https://secularhumanism.org/exclusive/they-think-its-murder/

If you wish to comment on it, you can do so here:
https://richarddawkins.net/2022/05/dawkins-on-the-overturning-of-roe-they-think-its-murder/

This is a slightly edited version of the essay written to accompany the transcript of the conversation between myself, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and the late, much-lamented Christopher Hitchens, recorded in Christopher’s flat in Washington DC in September 2007 and published in 2019 as The Four Horsemen.

In April 2015 I met Neil deGrasse Tyson, Director of the Hayden Planetarium, at his office in New York. We talked for nearly an hour and a half, ranging over many topics of passionate concern to us both, and our conversation was filmed and recorded for Neil’s radio show StarTalk. The following is an abbreviated transcript of parts of that conversation as printed in Books do Furnish a Life.

My mother Jean Dawkins, née Ladner, would never have guessed that she might become a posthumously published poet.  She died in 2019 aged 102.  A year or so later, Anthony Grayling noticed one of her poems quoted in my autobiography, and he wrote to ask me if there were more. My sister Sarah Kettlewell and I searched through her papers and found the poems now published by Greville Press Pamphlets.

A fellow at the Drones was bending my ear last night over the snort that refreshes. Seems there’s a cove called Darwin who says Genesis is all a lot of rot. God’s been oversold on the campus. He didn’t make everything after all. There’s something called evaluation . . .”

“Evolution sir. The theory advanced by Charles Darwin in his great book of 1859, On the Origin of Species.”