Listen to a podcast with Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins is that rare specimen, a public intellectual, a knight of the mind who goes into battle against the ignorance and foolhardiness of the populace. Unlike the French, who worship their public intellectuals, giving them pet names such as les intellos, and airing them regularly on serious television and in print, the British like to shove academics into a musty corner, or laugh at them. This was not always the case: the Victorians, with their public lectures and royal societies, gloried in debate and celebrated the thrills of fresh knowledge. The nearest we get to this now is celebrating the thrill of Germaine Greer walking out of Celebrity Big Brother.

The marginalisation of academia is partly self-created by its pomp and obfuscatory language. Dawkins broke out of the ghetto long ago thanks not just to an extraordinary mind, but to a gift for elegant communication and controversy: the English-language version of his recent paean to atheism, The God Delusion, has sold 1.5million copies (it has been translated into 31 other languages). He is big in airport bookshops. In 1976, when his first book, The Selfish Gene, was published, The New York Times explained the mind-expanding pleasure of his science-lit as “the sort of popular science writing that makes the reader feel like a genius”.

In these barren, thoughtless times, Dawkins gives people something substantial to chew on. His audience is surprisingly grateful, and also relieved to see someone slapping creationists about and tossing them into the primordial soup, as well as explaining atheism positively. Before I went to interview him about his new three-part television series, Dawkins on Darwin, various over-excited friends offered to accompany me and texted questions for me to ask him; signed copies were requested of The God Delusion, which one Iranian exile said he had recently found himself reading as his plane landed – everyone else was clutching the Koran.

The life of Darwin

It has been said with truth that we must go back to Newton before we meet with Darwin's peer

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The Darwin-Dawkins combo was of some fascination too; one acquaintance lent me her much-loved copy of On the Origin of Species. “The language is beautiful. I read it for a Victorian literature course, not science,” she said. And that, perhaps, is one of the reasons for the strong connection between Dawkins and Darwin. “Every line of Darwin, you know he really wanted to be understood,” says Dawkins. “There was no pretentious showing off about him.”

When Dawkins set out long ago to bring science to the masses, he says he was not consciously imitating Darwin, but had the same aims as him: “To be understood, to inspire.” His post at Oxford – the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science – is appropriate. The ethologist-philosopher has been appearing on television since Horizon in the Seventies; his last series for Channel 4 was The Enemies of Reason, an attack on the bandwagons of astrology, the tarot, psychics and homoeopathy.

He has also embraced new media: his website gets huge traffic and is linked to Facebook and MySpace: “67 – Male – Oxford – London”. There are 40 Dawkins-related videos on YouTube, some of which have been viewed more than one million times. It’s not the usual medium of communication for a man of his generation.

For final proof that Dawkins, rather than God, is everywhere, you need only to have seen the most recent series of Doctor Who, in which Dawkins played a cameo as himself. Russell T. Davies, the executive producer of the series, is a fan. “He has brought atheism proudly out of the closet,” Davies says.

Dawkins has a real-life connection with Doctor Who: he is married to Lalla Ward, who was previously the wife of Tom Baker, having played the role of his assistant, Romana, in the series in the Seventies. Dawkins met her at a birthday party in 1992 for the late Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Lalla floats in and out of Dawkins’s vast living room and kitchen in Oxford, smiling and bearing espressos in terracotta mugs.

The Dawkins on Darwin programme – note who gets the first namecheck – was commissioned to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the presentation to the Linnean Society in London of Darwin’s paper on his theory of evolution, and the bicentennial of his birth next year. Dawkins says that natural selection is “the most important idea to occur to the human mind”, the slow change of species over millions of ideas disproving the religious theory of intelligent design by God.

That we are still trying to sell evolution to a large part of the public bothers him. “It is weird in many ways that natural selection is still debated,” he says. “But it is not debated by anyone who knows anything about it.” Indeed, Dawkins refuses to share a stage with creationists. “I don’t like giving them the oxygen of respectability, the feeling that if they’re up on a platform debating with a scientist, there must be real disagreement. One side of the debate is wholly ignorant. It would be as though you knew nothing of physics and were passionately arguing against Einstein’s theory of relativity.”

In the programme, he worries that evolution takes up little more than two hours of a child’s science education in school, against potentially a lifetime of religious indoctrination at home. He tries to persuade a class of secondary school children about evolution. He frowns, exasperated. “It is such a tragedy that children are being deprived of this extraordinary exciting knowledge, which is theirs for the taking. What a privilege that they live in the 21st century, when that knowledge is available, but how tragic that they’re being educated as though it were two centuries earlier.”

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