REG LITTLE talks to Richard Dawkins at his North Oxford home and finds him as combative as ever

Richard Dawkins had just been having a fierce debate involving the rape of an eight-year-old Yemen girl and his own brief experience of sexual abuse many years ago.

An argument on Twitter had been sparked by his recollection of an incident from his days at a Salisbury prep school, included in his newly published memoir An Appetite For Wonder: The Making of a Scientist.

The celebrated scientist was still clearly incensed about the exchange, as he settled into an armchair at his home in North Oxford.

“There is, to say the least, quite a difference between a school master sticking his hands inside a boy’s shorts and a 40-year-old raping an eight-year-old girl to death. Some people can’t tell the difference between these levels of wrong,” he tells me.

It is tempting to view Dawkins as the only professor who could end up engulfed in both public and private debates about child abuse — making headlines around the world — through the briefest of recollections of an unpleasant prep school incident.

It would seem the debate had moved on since he had first expressed reluctance to condemn people of an earlier era “by the standards of ours”, this coming in the aftermath of another Dawkins Twitterstorm over the number of Nobel Prizes picked up by Muslims.

But then you would be hard pressed to find another leading Oxford scientist quite as willing to engage with detractors directly in no-nonsense terms, whether we are talking sex or science, man or God.

The celebrated evolutionary biologist could easily claim to be the world’s best known atheist, having earlier this year been voted top thinker in Prospect magazine’s poll of 10,000 readers from over 100 countries.

Ever since the publication of his groundbreaking book The Selfish Gene back in 1976 — suggesting we are all “survival machines blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules know as genes” — he has also enjoyed fame as a best-selling author. How he came to write the book was even the subject of a BBC Four television series Beautiful Minds.

But now he has decided to set down what shaped him as a man and scientist in an autobiography covering his life up to the time he first offered us his radical new version of Darwinism. A second volume is promised in two years’ time.

The book certainly offers insight into how the author of The God Delusion, came to lose his own faith at a comparatively early age, with Elvis Presley playing an unlikely part.

The renowned evolutionary biologist cannot complain about the quality of his own genes, coming from a family of accomplished scientists. His father was a botanist, who was posted as a junior agricultural officer in Nyasaland, now Malawi.

For a biologist-in-the-making, it meant the young Dawkins had the huge privilege of spending his early life surrounded by wildlife in colonial Africa. When asked if this prepared him to become a biologist, he is typically honest. “No. It did not impact upon me as much as it should have done. I don’t think that I was that good an observer, which was a shame.”

He recalls being taken within 10 yards of a pride of lions who had made a kill. While the adults sat transfixed with excitement, he stayed on the floor totally absorbed with his toy cars.

He was to receive one painful rebuke for his deficiencies as a naturalist from a scorpion.

“I saw it crawling across the floor and I misidentified it as a lizard. How could I? Lizards and scorpions don’t resemble each other in any respect that I can now see. I thought it would be fun to feel the ‘lizard’ run over my bare foot, so I stuck it in the animal’s path. The next thing I knew I was suffering a burning pain.”

At the age of seven, he was sent away from home to attend Eagle School, a boarding school in Southern Rhodesia. It turned out to have been founded by Frank ‘Tank’ Cary, a former housemaster from Oxford’s Dragon School, who had gone to Africa to seek his fortune.

“Hymns made a big impression on me,” he says. But his sadness is reflected in his memory of the matron Miss Copplestone. Every day he would imagine she would fantasise that she would somehow magically be transformed into his mother. “I prayed incessantly for this,” he says.

On return to England, his family settled in Over Norton, his parents celebrating their 70th wedding anniversary together shortly before his father’s death in 2010, aged 95.

Prof Dawkins’s education continued at Chafyn Grove in Salisbury.

Today he still looks back at the experience with a sense of guilt, chiding himself for failing “to lift a finger” to stop the grotesque bullying he witnessed.

“It is the hallmark of the successful bully to have a posse of loyal lieutenants, and again we see this brutally manifested in the verbal cruelty and bullying that has become epidemic on Internet forums, where abusers have the additional protection of anonymity,” he observes. “But I don’t recall feeling even secret pity for the victim of the bullying at Chafyn Grove. How is that possible? It troubles me to this day.” The sexual abuse occurred at the age of 11 when a master pulled him on to his knee. Prof Dawkins writes: “He did no more than have a little feel, but it was extremely disagreeable (the cremasteric reflex is not painful, but in a skin-crawling, creepy way it was almost worse than painful) as well as embarrassing. As soon as I could wriggle off his lap, I ran to tell my friends, many of whom had had the same experience with him. I don’t think he did any of us any lasting damage, but some years later he killed himself.”

At this time he became “intensely religious,” praying every night and he arrived at Oundle, in Northamptonshire, as a confirmed Anglican. His faith was to be reinforced by Elvis Presley, of all people, whose music he adored. Passing a shop window in Chipping Norton, he had spotted the Elvis album Peace in the Valley, featuring the song I Believe, where Elvis sings how the wonders of the natural word served to reinforce his faith. For the young Dawkins it amounted to “a sign from heaven”.

“Why I was surprised that Elvis was religious is now beyond me,” he now says. “He came from an uneducated working family in the American south.”

By his final year, aged 17, he was to become “militantly” anti-religious. With two other friends he refused to kneel down in chapel and would sit defiantly with arms folded and lips closed.

His discovery of Darwinian evolution was to easily counter the influence of Elvis and was to determine the course of his life. Oxford University, where he read zoology, however, was to be the real catalyst. “I didn’t have a riotous time at university. I missed out a bit,” he said. He was not to lose his virginity until the age of 22, to a cellist in London, who had removed her skirt to play for him in her bedsit.

After a brief reflection on “why the nervous systems evolved in such a way to make sexual congress one of the consistently greatest experiences life has to offer,” he moves swiftly on.

“It isn’t that kind of autobiography,” he insists.

Prof Dawkins, 72, who is married to actress Lalla Ward, the former assistant to Dr Who, retired from his position as Oxford University Professor of Public Understanding of Science in 2008.

But it is clear the man widely known for his pronouncements on religion, is determined to increase understanding of his real life’s work.

“One of the things I have tried to do in my memoir is to talk a lot about the science. It was and is the most important part of my life.”

The Selfish Gene was produced during the miners’ strike in 1973 because power cuts had put a stop to his research on crickets, writing it in what he now calls “a frenzy of creative energy”.

Few other books have done more to bring evolutionary science to the wider public and he has continued to spread the word ever since, not least on Tuesday night when he delivered a talk about his book at the Sheldonian Theatre.

“I am pleased I wrote The God Delusion,” he said. “I stand by it completely but I do not wish that to be the main part of what I leave behind.”

Others may dub him the ‘God of the Godless’, but Prof Dawkins continues to see himself as a labourer in Darwin’s vineyard, still with plenty of work to do.