Professor Richard Dawkins speaks at Centre for Life

Jun 18 2010 by Karen Wilson, The Journal

THE world’s most famous atheist Professor Richard Dawkins was in Newcastle last night speaking to a packed audience at The Centre for Life’s 10th Anniversary Lecture.

Famed for books like The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion, biologist Dawkins is rarely out of the news with his trenchant defences of evolution and loathing of religion.

The talk was introduced by Alastair Balls, chairman of the Centre for Life, who highlighted the centre’s achievements in stem cell research, genetics and cancer discoveries, as well as its reputation as Europe’s biggest provider of educational science workshops.

Dawkins was in conversation with his former pupil Northumberland-born Dr Matt Ridley, co-founder and life president of the Centre for Life.

Ridley claimed Dawkins’ gene-centred view of evolution “caused a revolution in science” and added: “Not many people know that Richard Dawkins transformed scientific theory by the unusual means of writing a popular best-seller, something that had been done before by someone called Charles Darwin.” Asked how life began, Dawkins said: “Nobody knows how life began and maybe we never will, but we can say that the key step was the origin of self copying. If you asked the question what properties would life have anywhere in the universe, my first answer would be self replication followed by Darwinian natural selection.” Moving onto extra terrestrial life, Dawkins pointed out that with billions of planets in the universe, suggesting life only exists on one planet is “as improbable as having all four players in a game of bridge having a perfect hand”.

However, he thought contacting alien life forms would be unlikely. “It could be that the universe is teaming with the equivalent of the bacteria of life, but never made it through the next barrier to the eukaryotic cell.” The pair also touched on scientist Craig Venter’s recent unveiling of Cynthia, a bacteria cell containing a synthetic genetic code.

Ridley thought “the chances of this thing going out and running amok was like the chances of a tricycle going beserk on the M1” while Dawkins said it could pave the way to using bacteria to make oil or revive extinct species. “You’d have to find a woman to volunteer to give birth to it though,” he joked.

Dawkins also raised a few laughs by revealing his avatar in the virtual reality computer game Second Life is “a very nubile female” and told how he was once accosted by an actor dressed as Charles Darwin for a Japanese TV programme.

After taking several questions from the floor, Dawkins underlined how scientists “thrive on what we don’t know” such as the evolution of consciousness.

He urged young people to “ask questions, be curious, be skeptical. Don’t be satisfied with anything less than evidence. Always keep open minded. Don’t believe what’s handed down by tradition. Go out and think for yourself, look for yourself, ask questions for yourself.”

THE Centre for Life will be holding a 10th Anniversary Debate on Wednesday 13th October entitled ‘Science – Where in the Next Ten Years?’ To book tickets for this free event call 0191 243 8269 or visit www.life.org.uk/whats-on

A long career

REFERRED to affectionately as ‘Darwin’s Rottweiller’, Richard Dawkins burst into the public consciousness in 2006 thanks to his Channel 4 documentary The Root of All Evil and best-selling book The God Delusion.

Since then the evolutionary biologist has become a rallying point for atheists across the globe. But the former Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University has been changing the scientific landscape and people’s views for years. Writing on evolution and biology since 1976, his book The Selfish Gene popularised the gene-centred view of evolution.

And he began to be associated with religious argument when in 1986 his book The Blind Watchmaker argued against the watchmaker analogy – an argument for the existence of a supernatural creator.

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