He's baaack: Selfish Gene author pens one for the kids [View All]

[rug]

By Hawes Spencer | [e-mail]
Published online 1:13pm Thursday Sep 29th, 2011

The author of The Selfish Gene is back in Charlottesville. This time, however, the British scientist and atheist extraordinaire (he's also author of the 2006 best-seller The God Delusion) will speak at a venue that may be big enough to hold the crowds clamoring for his rational view of the world.

When he spoke here at Gilmer Hall in 2009, hundreds were shunted to overflow video-feed rooms to hear Dawkins argue that, unlike religion, the theory of Natural Selection sets itself up for disapproval every day. All it would take to undo Darwin, he said then, would be to find something out of place amid the fossils– like a bunny rabbit mixed in a stratum of dinosaurs.

Now he's back in the States to launch a new lecture tour and promote a new book for teens and young adults, The Magic of Reality, to be published by Simon & Schuster on the day of his talk at UVA. We had a few minutes on the phone with Dawkins this morning.

You're 70: what do you think of other people getting to that age without entertaining the idea of a rational existence?
Dawkins: I feel pity for them, and I would like to do all in my power for children in the next 70 years to be brought up in fuller knowledge of the world in which we live.

http://www.readthehook.com/101135/hes-baaack-selfish-gene-author-pens-one-kids