The Atlantic decided they needed a piece on Richard Dawkins’s “farewell tour”, but they either chose the wrong journalist or asked the author to write a semi hit-piece that made Dawkins look bad. Not completely bad, mind you, for the author does mention a few good things Dawkins has done. But, overall, the piece depicts an aging man who simply needs to fight battles, and now there are no battles to fight. Once it was creationism, says senior editor Ross Andersen, but now it’s the lesser battle of “fighting wokeness”.
Since Andersen himself shows signs of “progressive” thought in his piece (he defends, for example, the teaching Māori legends as science in New Zealand), he may have an animus against Richard. I don’t know, but I know two things. First, Andersen shows no signs of having read Dawkins’s books or followed his career. Second, Anderson ends his piece, which describes his opinion of Richard’s recent lecture in Washington D.C., by saying “I was bored.” His pronouncement is distinctly un-journalistic given that Andersen describes a very enthusiastic audience lining up to get books signed, and bespeaks a reviewer more concerned with his own personal reaction than with the effect of Dawkins, his writing, and his Washington discussion on the audience (and on society in general).
Click on the headline below to read it, or, if you can’t, you can find it archived here. Several readers sent me this piece—I suppose expecting to get my reaction. So here it is: the piece stinks.
The dissing starts off in a subtle way with the title (granted, Andersen may not have written it, but the Atlantic approved it). But in the second sentence, Andersen says this:
[Dawkins] has adapted his swaggering Oxbridge eloquence to a variety of media ecosystems.
Anybody who knows or has even heard Richard knows that his eloquence is not “swaggering,” but measured and reserved. But I’ll leave that aside and pass on. Here, also, in the first paragraph, Andersen describes Dawkins’s first foray into atheism:
In 2006’s The God Delusion, another mega–best seller, Dawkins antagonized the world’s religions.
“Antagonized the world’s religions”? Well, yes, some believers may have been offended, but what about adding that this book made an eloquent argument against religion, and, in fact (as Andersen says later!), changed people’s lives for the better. That sentence is like saying, “In Mein Kampf, Hitler antagonized the world’s Jews.” It may be true, but both statements are certainly pejorative and woefully incomplete.
Throughout the piece, Anderson describes how energized, worshipful, and jazzed up the audience was. But of course Anderson was “bored”. Here is part of his description:
Now, at age 83, Dawkins is saying goodbye to the lecture circuit with a five-country tour that he’s marketing as his “Final Bow.” Earlier this month, I went to see him at the Warner Theatre in Washington, D.C. Dawkins has said that when he visits the U.S., he has the most fun in the Bible Belt, but most of his farewell-tour appearances will take place in godless coastal cities. After all, Dawkins has a new book to sell—The Genetic Book of the Dead—and at the Warner, it was selling well. I saw several people holding two or three copies, and one man walking around awkwardly with nine, steadying the whole stack beneath his chin. The line to buy books snaked away from the theater entrance and ran all the way up the stairs. It was longer than the line for the bar.
As for the audience, which was surely diverse:
The packed theater looked like a subreddit come to life. Bald white heads poked above the seat backs, as did a few ponytails and fedoras. This being an assembly of freethinkers, there was no standard uniform, but I did spot lots of goatees and black T-shirts. The faded silk-screen graphics on the tees varied. One was covered in equations. Another featured a taxonomy of jellyfish extending onto its sleeves. These people had not come here merely to see a performer; Dawkins had changed many of their lives. A man in the row behind me said that he had attended Dawkins’s show in Newark, New Jersey, the previous night. As a Christian teen, he had sought out videos of Dawkins, hoping that they would prepare him to rebut arguments for evolution. He ultimately found himself defeated by the zoologist’s logic, and gave up his faith.
. . . Jake Klein, the director of the Virginia Chapter of Atheists for Liberty [JAC: the “warm-up” act], told a similar conversion story onstage, before introducing Dawkins. Klein said The God Delusion had radicalized him against the Orthodox Judaism of his youth. Millions of other creationists had similar experiences, Klein said. He credited Dawkins with catalyzing an important triumph of reason over blind superstition.
Indeed, Dawkins has changed many lives for the better; his books were an important impetus for people not only accepting the scientific truth of evolution, but also grasping the wonder and majesty of both natural selection and evolution—not to mention helping people throw off the constricting chains of religion. (I’m a small fish, but I myself have been told that that Why Evolution is True and Faith Versus Fact have also changed lives.) Given the dominance of creationism in America—37% of Americans still accept Biblical creationism, 34% accept a form of God-guided evolution, while a mere 24% accept naturalistic evolution, making a total of 71% of Americans who think the supernatural played a role in evolution—accepting naturalistic evolution as true is a powerful reason to jettison your faith. And that’s what several people have told me about my first trade book.
More on audience appreciation for what Dawkins has done (attacking wokeness), a description tinged with opprobrium (my bolding):
Now that mainstream culture has moved on from big debates about evolution and theism, he no longer has a prominent foe that so perfectly suits his singular talent for explaining the creative power of biology. And so he’s playing whack-a-mole, swinging full strength, and without much discernment, at anything that strikes him as even vaguely irrational. His fans at the Warner Theatre didn’t seem to mind. For all I know, some of them had come with the sole intent of hearing Dawkins weigh in on the latest campus disputes and cancellations.
For nearly an hour, Dawkins stuck largely to science, and it served him well. The latter half of the evening was heavier on culture-war material. To whoops and hollers, Dawkins expressed astonishment that anyone could believe that sex is a continuum, instead of a straightforward binary. He described safety-craving college students as “pathetic wimps.” It all seemed small, compared with the majesty of the ideas he’d been discussing just minutes before.
Is the discussion of wokeness (mainly how ideology affects science) a problem? And doesn’t the author realize that the interlocutor, economist Steven Levitt, confected the questions without Dawkins’s knowledge of what they’d be? If Levitt wanted to ask Dawkins about wokeness or campus ferment, is that Dawkins’s fault? Besides, the audience wanted to hear a thoughtful person’s take on wokeness, which includes science: not only the biology of sex, but the low value of indigenous “knowledge” (see below).
And that brings us to one of several major misconceptions about Dawkins. Andersen seems to think that, throughout Richard’s life, he was motivated by contentiousness: everything he did was motivated by his need to have an enemy. That enemy was, avers Andersen initially creationism, but now has morphed into wokeness (see “whack-a-mole” above):
The day before, on a video call, Dawkins told me that he was puzzled—and disquieted—by the support he has received from the political right. He tends to support the Labour Party. He loathes Donald Trump. The New Atheist movement arose partly in response to the ascent of George W. Bush and other evangelicals in Republican politics. Its leaders—Dawkins, along with Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett—worried that public-school students would soon be learning creationism in biology class. But there has since been a realignment in America’s culture wars. Americans still fight over the separation of church and state, but arguments about evolution have almost completely vanished from electoral politics and the broader zeitgeist. With no great crusade against creationism to occupy him, Dawkins’s most visible moments over the past 15 years have been not as a scientist but as a crusader against “wokeness”—even before that was the preferred term.
First, creationism is still with us, and in a big way. I gave the figures above, but Andersen, who’s supposed to know science, doesn’t seem to realize that far more Americans are creationists than are materialistic evolutionists, and more than 7 out of 10 of us think that God played some role in evolution. We have a long way to go. Further, arguments about evolution aren’t gone, for the Intelligent Design miscreants are still plaguing us. As for electoral politics, evolution never played a prominent role there except once (in 2008, three of the Republican Presidential candidates in a debate raised their hands to show they didn’t accept evolution.) Evolution simply isn’t on the electoral agenda compared to the economy and, right now, immigration. And doesn’t Andersen know that the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, is a creationist? Further, many of us worry, and justifiably so, that the Supreme Court, which hasn’t adjudicated the teaching of evolution since 1987, might now revisit the issue and allow creationism to be taught. Given the present composition of the court, that’s entirely possible.
I’ve known Richard for much longer than has Andersen, and I can’t agree with his conclusion that Richard needs an enemy to thrive. Dawkins started off writing a book expounding how evolution worked (The Selfish Gene), and as far as I remember that book barely mentions creationism, if at all. It was designed not to fight creationists but to enlighten both scientists and readers about how natural selection worked. This was followed by more books explaining evolution (Climbing Mount Improbable. The Extended Phenotype—Richard’s favorite—and my favorite, the Blind Watchmaker) and of course there are several more books explaining evolution.
The fight against creationism, I think, only came later, when Richard saw to his dismay that his views weren’t immediately embraced by the American public (I had the same reaction when I wrote Wby Evolution is True). He saw, correctly, that that opposition came almost exclusively from religion. And so, only in 2009 (three decades after The Selfish Gene) did Richard write an explicitly anticreationist book: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidcence for Evolution. My own parallel is having the same realization about religious opposition to evolution, which led to my writing Faith Versus Fact after WEIT. Richard’s main motivation, as I see it, was not to fight creationism, but to share the wonder of evolution and natural selection that he himself felt. Since The Selfish Gene, he’s written 18 books, only two against religion and creationism; and his most recent books, Flights of Fancy: Defying Gravity by Design and Evolution, and The Genetic Book of the Dead: A Darwinian Reverie, are pure science.
As for Richard’s new “opponent”, wokeness, Andersen has to reach back into Dawkins’s Precambrian Twitter feed, basing this criticdism on just three tweets. He even mentions Elevatorgate, without noting that Richard apologized for that tweet. And as for this one, well, I see nothing wrong with it: it raises a good question for debate first broached by philosopher Rebecca Tuvel in the journal Hypatia:
Dawkins is raising the question for discussion, though Andersen denigrates this important issue by saying it’s a “just-asking-questions” (JAQ) tweet. He doesn’t seem to realize that Dawkins was a professor and teacher, and this is very similar to the kind of questions an Oxford don would ask his students to write about.
At any rate, Andersen really shows his own wokeness, and, importantly, his ignorance of what’s going on in New Zealand, when he criticizes Richard’s emphasis on not teaching Māori “ways of knowing” alongside and coequal to modern science in New Zealand. This is an ongoing problem that I’ve written about many times, and one Andersen wrongly dismisses as a non-problem:
The tale of Lysenko is almost fable-like in its moral purity, and Dawkins told it well, but only as a setup for a contemporary controversy that he wished to discuss—an ongoing dispute over school curricula in New Zealand. According to one proposal, students there would learn traditional creation stories and myths alongside standard science lessons, out of deference to the Māori, whose language and culture British settlers had tried earnestly to erase. Dawkins noted that some eminent New Zealand scientists had “stuck their heads above the parapet” to object to this idea with an open letter in 2021, and were “unpleasantly punished” for doing so. He called this mob rule, and expressed concern for the young students. They could end up confused, he said, forced as they would be to reconcile lessons about the “sky father” and “earth mother” with those that concern the Big Bang and evolution.
I suspect that kids can hold those two things in mind. I suspect also that the project of science—no innocent bystander in the treatment of Indigenous people—will be best served if its most prominent voices address themselves to the Māori, and other such groups, in an imaginative spirit of synthesis and reconciliation. But even if I am wrong about all that, the specter of Lysenko would seem to have little bearing on a case in which no scientist has been officially punished. Complaints about the open letter did produce an initial investigation by the Royal Society Te Apārangi, as a matter of process, but nothing more.
The errors in these two paragraphs are at least four:
1.) The endeavor to keep modern science free from indigenous superstition was not just in the Listener Letter, but is an ongoing battle between rationalism and superstition.
2.) The battle continues because kids CANNOT hold two different conceptions of science in their mind at once. It is confusing and simply bad pedagogy.
3.) Scientists were officially punished for denying the scientific worth of indigenous knowledge. See this report by the New Zealand Initiative. Not only were professors punished and investigated, but the ubiquity of Māori sacralization in New Zealand has chilled both university teaching and the speech of professors and students.
4.) Andersen’s ignorance is particularly strong when, Tom-Friedman-like, he proposes a melding of Māori “ways of knowing” and science in “an imaginative spirit of synthesis and reconciliation.” That idea has led to the ludicrous notion, for example, that kauri blight (a tree disease) might be cured by rubbing the trees with whale bones and whale oil while saying Māori prayers. That is the imaginative synthesis that’s happening at this moment, and it’s in all the sciences.
The final paragraph is, frankly, offensive to journalists and readers alike:
After he took his last bow, the lights went out, and I tried to understand what I was feeling. I didn’t leave the show offended. I wasn’t upset. It was something milder than that. I was bored.
Who cares if Andersen was bored? The crowd wasn’t bored and many paid extra for VIP tickets to get their books custom-signed and say a few words to Richard, while others formed a bigger line to get pre-signed books. All we learn here is that the author feels superior to both Dawkins and the crowd. I went to Dawkins’s talk here in Chicago, and I wasn’t bored, even at times when I disagreed with what Richard said. And I’m an evolutionary biologist who’s written a lot about the fracas in New Zealand. It appears that Mr. Andersen is not just journalistically ham-handed, but also incurious.
