IC: This fits into the two conflicting popular conceptions of scientists. You have this very serious person who’s doing experiments and is somewhat austere. And then you have these dorky people who love Star Trek and Star Wars.

RD: Well, Professor Challenger, Conan Doyle’s science hero, was a sort of irascible man constantly bellowing at people, so he was a little bit of a departure from both of those stereotypes.

IC: So you don’t feel like you fit either stereotype?

RD: No, I don’t think I do.

IC: You have more of a reputation as someone who shouts people down.

RD: I don’t shout people down. I argue people down, perhaps.

IC: Your book The Selfish Gene talks a lot about Darwinian altruism: How the promulgation of the species causes us to act in generous ways. Some people have said that altruism is something distinct—when you go out of your way to do something nice that’s not about the promulgation of your tribe.

RD: People who criticize The Selfish Gene like that often haven’t read it. The selfish gene accounts for altruism toward kin and individuals who might be in a position to reciprocate your altruism.

Now, there is another kind of altruism that seems to go beyond that, a kind of super-altruism, which humans appear to have. And I think that does need a Darwinian explanation. I would offer something like this: We, in our ancestral past, lived in small bands or clans, which fostered kin altruism and reciprocal altruism, because in these small bands, each individual was most likely to be surrounded by relatives and individuals who he was going to meet again and again in his life. And so the rule of thumb based into the brain by natural selection would not have been, Be nice to your kin and be nice to potential reciprocators. It would have been, Be nice to everybody, because everybody would have been included.

It’s just like sexual lust. We have sexual lust even though we know perfectly well that, because we’re using contraception, it is not going to result in the propagation of our genes. That doesn’t matter, because the lust was built into our brains at a time when there was no contraception.





IC: One problem with these Darwinian explanations, however convincing they are, is that they aren’t really falsifiable.

RD: That is a very common criticism, and it’s probably a valid one. That doesn’t mean they’re wrong, of course. I think from my point of view—I won’t say it doesn’t matter whether they’re right or wrong, it’s just sufficient in some cases, for me, to be able to say, Well, at least it’s not totally implausible from a Darwinian point of view.

IC: But is that science?

RD: Yes, it sort of is. I mean, it would be really worrying if, as a Darwinian, it was impossible to think of ways in which our behavior could be explained.

IC: But it seems like evolutionary psychology gets presented as hard science in a way that it’s not.

RD: I think that’s absolutely right, and the better examples of evolutionary psychology actually do get evidence. They do psychological studies.

IC: To what degree did your findings on the selfish gene influence your feelings about politics or religion or the world at large? Or do you bracket those things?

RD: I think I put them in a separate compartment. I’ve always been antagonistic to any naïve application of the selfish gene theory to politics. Some people have attempted to suggest that it means we are selfish or we should be selfish.

IC: What other big thinkers do you really like?

RD: Daniel Kahneman.

IC: What about novelists?

RD: I read novels for entertainment rather than for edification, so I tend not to read the sort of novels that are said to illuminate the human condition.

IC: You don’t look to art for that?

RD: I have never quite understood—and this is no doubt my failing—I never quite understood why you would read fiction to understand the human condition. Although I’m easily persuaded that a really good novelist who gets inside somebody else’s head could be serving a valuable purpose. I enjoy satirical novels that take a wry, humorous, ironic look at modern life.

IC: You know, Jonah Lehrer, the disgraced former New Yorker writer, has a book called Proust Was a Neuroscientist.

RD: I haven’t read that.

IC: Well, it’s a stupid book, but the idea is that science has uncovered things about the way the brain works that novelists did in the past. I do think you can find something about the human condition by reading George Eliot or Dickens.

RD: You probably can. That’s probably right.

IC: I was wondering what you think of the current Pope. What’s your emotional reaction to religious figures who don’t seem so doctrinaire or who reach out to people who are less religious?

RD: I’m a sucker for nice religious leaders. I fall for it every time. But that doesn’t mean that I accept their arguments. Pope Francis seems to be a much nicer man than Pope Benedict, but I’m not sure that his views on things that really matter are all that different. Whereas Benedict was perhaps a wolf in wolf’s clothing, Francis is perhaps a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

IC: People talk about “new atheism.” Is there something new about it?

RD: No, there isn’t. Nothing that wasn’t in Bertrand Russell or probably Robert Ingersoll. But I suppose it is more of a political effect, in that all these books happened to come out at the same time. I like to think that we have some influence.

IC: Sometimes when I read the so-called new atheists, there’s almost a certain intellectual respect for the fundamentalist thinkers. For being more intellectually coherent.

RD: I’m interested you noticed that. There’s an element of paradox there—that at least you know where you stand with the fundamentalists. I mean, they’re absolutely clear in their error and their stupidity, and so you can really go after them. But the so-called sophisticated theologians, especially ones who are very nice, like Rowan Williams and Jonathan Sacks, you sometimes don’t quite know where you are with them. You feel that when you attack them, you’re attacking a wet sponge.

IC: Do you want people to become secular, or do you want religion to be less conservative and patriarchal?

RD: Ideally, I’d like everybody to be secular. I suppose I have to say politically I would like religion to become gentler and nicer and to stop interfering with other people’s lives, stop repressing women, stop indoctrinating children, all that sort of thing. But I really, really would like to see religion go away altogether.

IC: Have you ever been tempted by faith? Felt there was something missing?

RD: It’s wonderful what we’ve got! How much more do you want? It would be a shallow chimera to want some sort of spook in the sky to look up to when you have such wonderful reality.

Isaac Chotiner is a senior editor at The New Republic.

This interview has been edited and condensed.