Travelling via the US is a bit of a trial for the evolutionary biologist, thanks to security gone mad. But later, he goes on to encounter another, lovely, kind of booby - and a terrific eco-friendly sports car

Whenever I suffer through an airport these days, I hear the mocking laughter of Osama bin Laden. Murdering 3,000 innocent men and women with loved ones to weep for them (Allah be praised) was only the start (swamped by road accidents and domestic murders, 9/11 made no noticeable blip in the US violent death statistics for a typical September). No, bin Laden's lasting achievement, the one that has him sniggering daily into his beard, is to have created the Office of Homeland Security, risible monument to belated stable-door closure.

The payoff for bin Laden has been mayhem and chaos, costly delays and maddening inconvenience to millions of travellers, in every hour of every day, in every airport of every country (except some Third World ones with the good sense to ignore the whole charade).

That useless plastic cutlery was nothing but a signal to the home electorate: We're gonna kick some ass, and these plastic knives show it, you better believe it. And did some bearded loon once pack explosives into his shoes? Right then, we'll show those folks we mean business. We'll smoke 'em out and teach those terrorists who rules this town, yessirree. From now on nobody - and Ah mean nobody - boards a plane without first removing their shoes, anywhere - and Ah mean anywhere - in God's own country.

And we all like sheep refuse to go astray. We know that, if we so much as joke about exploding brassieres being the next scare, we risk being locked up until rescued by a harassed British consul. Better bite our tongue and endure the joke that Osama bin Laden is playing, through his Keystone Cops-like agents in the Office of Homeland Security.

Not that we here have anything to be proud of. In the Britain presided over by Bush's loyal friend and co-religionist, our security services were surfing the web when they spotted what looked to their fevered imaginations like a plot to make a 'binary' explosion on a plane by mixing two otherwise harmless liquids. For a hilarious explanation that this is, and always was, totally unrealistic (you need large quantities of ingredients and buckets and buckets of ice) see www.theregister.co.uk.

Yet, as a direct consequence of what seems to have been an elementary misunderstanding of chemistry, we all have to dump even the tiniest bottles of liquid on our way through security.

Gateway to Galapagos is the airport of Miami, and I had to pass through it going both ways. You might think a passenger in transit from Ecuador to Britain would be allowed to stay airside and not formally enter the US. But that would be too simple and convenient: insufficient chest-beating by Homeland Security. Since 9/11 - universal American pretext for inconveniencing the public (over here, Health and Safety does the job) - the rules have changed.

Homeland Security insists the passenger from Ecuador (me) has to pick up his luggage, queue to clear it through the Miami customs, queue to enter the US (fingerprints, photograph, passport stamp, green form and all), then queue to leave the United States again, queue to remove shoes and laptop ... and consequently (it happened to me last time I made the journey) miss the connection to London. This time I made it - just.

But enough of moaning. No traveller should moan who has just visited the Galapagos. It was good to be alive as I swam among the marine iguanas and the breathtakingly tame Galapagos sea lions, or walked among the flightless cormorants (unique to Galapagos) hanging their useless stubby wings out to dry. This week I came within touching distance (I did not touch) of nesting wave albatrosses, and of boobies, high-stepping their powder-blue feet in the slow-motion ballet of their surreal courtship. I have watched, spellbound, as boobies and pelicans rained down like arrows into the water, in a feeding frenzy that must strike the fish below with the fishy equivalent of shock and awe.

Our impressive Ecuadorian guides told us that boobies eventually go blind, the consequence of years of repeated high-velocity impacts of their eyes on the water. As Darwin would have realised (The Origin of Species is rich in such economic insights), this accords with natural selection. Eventual death by blinding is the price paid for successful reproduction earlier in life - successful passing on of the genes that laid down this ultimately suicidal behaviour.

I went to Galapagos as guest lecturer of the Centre for Inquiry (CFI), an American charity devoted to secular humanism and critical thinking, whose members paid handsomely to enable the CFI to book a whole ship, the Santa Cruz, and explore Galapagos in Darwin's footsteps. As you'd expect, this was an intelligent crowd, who gave me a lively time in the questions after my three lectures.

American atheists today walk with a spring in their step, a new confidence that they have not known since the lights went out on their Enlightened secular foundation. They are coming out of the closet in droves, and I like to credit the series of recent bestselling books, by Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and others.

For a zoologist, Galapagos is an enchanted, near-sacred place. Partly because Darwin walked those lava fields in the springtime of his genius. But also because we all can see, as if through Darwin's deep-set eyes, life's difference-engine at its simplest. Then there is the ingenuous tameness of the animals, pursuing their evolved business in prelapsarian innocence of the gawping, camera-snapping human traffic in their midst. Mortally threatened by commerce and cheap aviation fuel, how long will this scientific Eden last?

It's been a time of nonstop travel. Time magazine had invited me to New York for a posh celebration, a dinner to celebrate their '100 Most Influential People of The Year' and I built the diversion into my route to Galapagos. Then I was offered an unexpected lift to New York in the private jet of the entrepreneur Elon Musk, en route to Los Angeles.

Greatly looking forward to my trip, I discovered a snag. British citizens can enter the US without a visa, but not if they arrive on a private plane. The prospect of queuing for a visa at the Grosvenor Square embassy drove me to desperate lateral thinking. Canada, of course. Mr Musk might even prefer Toronto to New York as his refuelling stop, it being closer to the great circle from England to California. And I could please my Canadian publisher with a day of interviews. Everything fell into place. I could kill at least three birds with one stone.

Elon Musk turned out to be delightful. One of the most remarkable men I have ever met, he had made his first fortune by devising PayPal. Then he invested it in two other enterprises, both of which made inspired use of his genius as a design engineer. His SpaceX company builds wholly re-usable spacecraft (the Nasa space shuttle is only partially re-usable). And, coming down to earth, his Tesla company (Teslamotors.com) is about to market affordable electric cars with a running cost of one penny per mile and the potential (I hope, though Elon is more cautious) to kill the internal combustion engine stone dead. If only he could kill the oil trade too, and hence the undeserved power of infamous countries such as Saudi Arabia.

The first production model Teslas will be high-performance sports cars with an acceleration of 0 to 60 mph in four seconds, assembled by Lotus in Britain but available only in America at first. Later models will broaden the range and the market. I'm putting my name down for one as soon as they appear over here.

My Toronto visit was strenuous: five television interviews and one radio, all in one day beginning before breakfast. I had never really believed in authors' publicity tours, and was astounded to be told that this one day of jet-lagged freneticism boosted my book from number 20 to number 3 on Canadian Amazon's bestseller list. Next day before breakfast, off again to New York, this time on a commercial plane - no visa.

The Dawkins CV

The Life Born 1941, Nairobi, Kenya, Clinton Richard Dawkins to farmer and soldier of aristocratic descent. Married three times, since 1992 to actress Lalla Ward. Educated at Balliol College, Oxford. Fellow of New College, Oxford since 1970 and of the Royal Society.

The Work 1967-9 assistant professor of zoology at the University of California, Berkeley, before returning to Oxford. Currently Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science. Author of nine books, first The Selfish Gene (1976) and most recently The God Delusion.