An Audience With Richard Dawkins

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The name of Dawkins first registered in my mind when I read an article "Is Science a Religion?". I was a fan almost immediately (and NOT after I saw how handsome he was, which is what my impish niece suggests). Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, popular science writer and at present the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding Of Science at Oxford. He is an outspoken atheist, who was compelled to say after the Sept 11th attacks, "I used to think religion was harmless nonsense, entitled to at least some respect. I'd now drop the 'harmless'. And the last vestige of respect." And perhaps angered many.

I searched for and read other articles on the net and then finally found a fantastic book 'Unweaving the Rainbow'! This time, I fell in love with Science, all over again. The book can be considered as a retort to the accusation by Keats that Newton had destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to the prismatic colors. Dawkins has set out to show "the feeling of spine-shivering, breath-catching awe — almost worship — this flooding of the chest with ecstatic wonder, that modern science can provide" (quote from 'is science religion?') and has fully succeeded.

Imagine my thrill when I heard that " An audience with Richard Dawkins" had been organised in a hall near where I live! I called up and booked my ticket. I couldn't wait to hear such a learned and articulate man of science speak. It turned out to be more than I hoped for. There were about five hundred people in the audience. First there was a reading of passages from his various books, 'Unweaving the Rainbow', ' A Devil's Chaplain' and his latest, 'The Ancestor's Tale', by Dawkins and his wife Lalla Ward. They made a superb job of it. Lalla Ward being an actress, was able to bring in that extra life into quotations and dialogues found in the passages.

Next came a Q and A session. It is one thing to produce written work of extreme clarity, and lucidity (not that it is easy!), but an entirely different matter to speak with these same qualities when asked unexpected questions. There were questions concerning the recent controversy in America regarding teaching creationism in schools, about the place of morality in the absence of religion, how evolution explained the existance of moral values in humans, how if given the chance, Dawkins would change the teaching of science in schools...... Whatever the questions were, the answers appeared well thought out, and were engrossing and extremely thought provoking. I also have to note that some of the questioners obviously disagreed with Dawkins on the matter of religion. But to the credit of both parties, the exchanges were in a most dignified manner.

At the end of the program there was a book signing. I had bought A Devil's Chaplain' earlier in the evening and I got Dawkins' autograph on it before I went home. An evening well spent.

I had been a little reluctant to pick up 'The Ancestor's Tale' because of its size, and the fact that it is entirely about evolution, but this experience has left me with a thirst to learn more about evolution. I think I will go for it.