Articles of faith

Richard Dawkins loves fighting. More precisely, he loves winning. To be Dawkinsed, as this selection from his essays of the past 25 years makes painfully clear, is not just to be dressed down or duffed up: it is to be squelched, pulverised, annihilated, rendered into suitably primordial paste. Those who incur this treatment have one thing in common: all are enemies of truth, Dawkins-style. Which is to say, all are enemies of science. In the current volume, his targets include postmodernists, bishops, religious leaders of other denominations (or ‘cloth-heads’, as he mollifyingly calls them), faith healers and New Ageists. Arch-rationalists will love these essays: others will find them by turns brilliant, boorish and idiotic.

Dawkins hasn’t always been like this, of course. For years he was known not as a polemicist but as a populariser. He rose to fame as the most adroit PR-man biology has ever had: a writer whose richly metaphoric prose dramatised genetics and evolution for a gigantic lay audience. A zoologist by training, his public reputation was secured more or less overnight in 1976 by the appearance of The Selfish Gene, the book which was acclaimed as having made Darwinism accessible, and having revealed altruism in nature for what it was: a parallax error, an anthropomorphic trick of the light. Genes, Dawkins explained, should be thought of as intelligent items of digital data whose sole aim was to replicate themselves successfully. The organisms they inhabited were merely ‘hosts’ to these genes. What looked like altruism, he argued, would always in fact be a disguised form of genetic self-interest.

There followed five more books on evolutionary themes, snappily titled and on the whole snappily written. And then, in the 1990s, Dawkins began to flex his muscles outside the domain of evolution. He started to appear with increasing frequency in public forums as science’s chief bully-boy, always ready to sock it to pseuds, and in particular to give religion (or ‘irrational superstition’, as he calls it) a thorough working-over.