The New Atheists Are Getting Old

For nearly five decades, Richard Dawkins has enjoyed a global fame rarely achieved by scientists. He has adapted his swaggering Oxbridge eloquence to a variety of media ecosystems. He began as an explainer of nature, a David Attenborough in print. His 1976 mega–best seller, The Selfish Gene, incepted readers with the generation-to-generation mechanics of natural selection; it also coined the word meme. In 2006’s The God Delusion, another mega–best seller, Dawkins antagonized the world’s religions. He became a leading voice of the New Atheist movement. His talks and debates did serious numbers on YouTube. Refusing to be left behind by the social-media age, he also learned to get his message across on Twitter (and then X), although sometimes as a bully or troll.

Now, at age 83, Dawkins is saying goodbye to the lecture circuit with a five-country tour that he’s marketing as his “Final Bow.” Earlier this month, I went to see him at the Warner Theatre in Washington, D.C. Dawkins has said that when he visits the U.S., he has the most fun in the Bible Belt, but most of his farewell-tour appearances will take place in godless coastal cities. After all, Dawkins has a new book to sell—The Genetic Book of the Dead—and at the Warner, it was selling well. I saw several people holding two or three copies, and one man walking around awkwardly with nine, steadying the whole stack beneath his chin. The line to buy books snaked away from the theater entrance and ran all the way up the stairs. It was longer than the line for the bar.

I ordered a whiskey and went to find my seat. The packed theater looked like a subreddit come to life. Bald white heads poked above the seat backs, as did a few ponytails and fedoras. This being an assembly of freethinkers, there was no standard uniform, but I did spot lots of goatees and black T-shirts. The faded silk-screen graphics on the tees varied. One was covered in equations. Another featured a taxonomy of jellyfish extending onto its sleeves. These people had not come here merely to see a performer; Dawkins had changed many of their lives. A man in the row behind me said that he had attended Dawkins’s show in Newark, New Jersey, the previous night. As a Christian teen, he had sought out videos of Dawkins, hoping that they would prepare him to rebut arguments for evolution. He ultimately found himself defeated by the zoologist’s logic, and gave up his faith.

Jake Klein, the director of the Virginia Chapter of Atheists for Liberty, told a similar conversion story onstage, before introducing Dawkins. Klein said The God Delusion had radicalized him against the Orthodox Judaism of his youth. Millions of other creationists had similar experiences, Klein said. He credited Dawkins with catalyzing an important triumph of reason over blind superstition. Klein’s opening remarks, to that point, could have described Dawkins of 20-odd years ago, when he was first going on the attack against religion’s “profligate wastefulness, its extravagant display of baroque uselessness.” But then things took a turn. Klein told the crowd that they couldn’t afford to be complacent. Human ignorance was not yet wholly vanquished. “Wokeness and conspiratorial thinking” had arisen to take the place of religious faith. Klein began ranting about cultural Marxists. He said that Western civilization needed to defend itself against “people who divide the world between the oppressors and the oppressed.” He sounded a lot like J. D. Vance.

The day before, on a video call, Dawkins told me that he was puzzled—and disquieted—by the support he has received from the political right. He tends to support the Labour Party. He loathes Donald Trump. The New Atheist movement arose partly in response to the ascent of George W. Bush and other evangelicals in Republican politics. Its leaders—Dawkins, along with Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett—worried that public-school students would soon be learning creationism in biology class. But there has since been a realignment in America’s culture wars. Americans still fight over the separation of church and state, but arguments about evolution have almost completely vanished from electoral politics and the broader zeitgeist. With no great crusade against creationism to occupy him, Dawkins’s most visible moments over the past 15 years have been not as a scientist but as a crusader against “wokeness”—even before that was the preferred term.

Dawkins the culture warrior could be snide, off-the-cuff, and downright toxic. In 2011, the atheist blogger Rebecca Watson spoke about the discomfort she felt when a man followed her into an elevator early in the morning at a Global Atheist Conference in Ireland. Dawkins—the most famous atheist of all—responded by posting a sarcastic letter to a hypothetical woman in the Muslim world, asking her to “think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.” A few years later, a Muslim teen in Texas was handcuffed and detained by authorities after showing his teacher a clock that he’d made, which she mistook for a bomb. Dawkins weighed in to argue that the boy had only pretended to make the clock, and that he might have wanted to get arrested. In 2021, he tweeted a just-asking-questions request for discussion of the differences between trans people and Rachel Dolezal, once the president of a local NAACP chapter who deceptively identified as Black.

When Klein kicked off the event at the Warner Theatre with a warning about the spread of cultural Marxism, Dawkins’s fans cheered him on, loudly. The only time I heard a bigger response was when Dawkins himself finally took the stage, wearing a gray suit, blue shirt, and white tie covered in “crocoducks,” imaginary creatures that figure prominently in a creationist argument against evolution. He looked 10 or 15 years younger than President Biden, our current standard candle for octogenarian fitness. His gin-dry wit is largely intact, and in the U.S., he can still coast on his English accent and habits of speech—his “quite” and his “lovely,” his tendency to end sentences with a lilting “isn’t it?,” his occasional offer to “have a go.” But he stops more frequently to collect his thoughts; it’s not as easy for him to purr along in the same pleasingly nasal cadence for long stretches at a time.

The format for the evening was a fireside chat between Dawkins and the economist and Freakonomics author Steven Levitt. They began with a discussion of natural selection, and stayed in that general register for quite a while. There were flashes of Dawkins in his prime. At one point, he slipped into a fluid five-minute riff on the “extended phenotype.” The basic idea—original to him—is that an organism’s genome will determine more than just its body makeup and behavior. It may also shape inanimate objects, as in the case of a bird and its nest, or other organisms, as with a parasite and its host. Considered in a certain light, a human’s phenotype could include not just the layer of technology that we have wrapped around our planet, but also the space probes that we have flung beyond the solar system’s borders. It’s a grand thought.

For nearly an hour, Dawkins stuck largely to science, and it served him well. The latter half of the evening was heavier on culture-war material. To whoops and hollers, Dawkins expressed astonishment that anyone could believe that sex is a continuum, instead of a straightforward binary. He described safety-craving college students as “pathetic wimps.” It all seemed small, compared with the majesty of the ideas he’d been discussing just minutes before.

Near the night’s end, Dawkins told the old story of Trofim Lysenko, Stalin’s chief agronomist. Lysenko did not believe in Mendelian genetics. He thought that after sprouting, crops could acquire new traits and pass them down to their seedlings, and he did not care to hear counterevidence. To the contrary, he brutally persecuted the scientists who disagreed with him. More than 3,000 biologists were fired, arrested, or executed, and yet, they were not the most numerous victims of Lysenko’s close-mindedness, not by a long shot. Under his influence, agricultural production in the Soviet Union—and China—suffered grievously. Historians estimate that his policies may have led to millions of famine deaths.

The tale of Lysenko is almost fable-like in its moral purity, and Dawkins told it well, but only as a setup for a contemporary controversy that he wished to discuss—an ongoing dispute over school curricula in New Zealand. According to one proposal, students there would learn traditional creation stories and myths alongside standard science lessons, out of deference to the Māori, whose language and culture British settlers had tried earnestly to erase. Dawkins noted that some eminent New Zealand scientists had “stuck their heads above the parapet” to object to this idea with an open letter in 2021, and were “unpleasantly punished” for doing so. He called this mob rule, and expressed concern for the young students. They could end up confused, he said, forced as they would be to reconcile lessons about the “sky father” and “earth mother” with those that concern the Big Bang and evolution.

I suspect that kids can hold those two things in mind. I suspect also that the project of science—no innocent bystander in the treatment of Indigenous people—will be best served if its most prominent voices address themselves to the Māori, and other such groups, in an imaginative spirit of synthesis and reconciliation. But even if I am wrong about all that, the specter of Lysenko would seem to have little bearing on a case in which no scientist has been officially punished. Complaints about the open letter did produce an initial investigation by the Royal Society Te Apārangi, as a matter of process, but nothing more.

Dawkins seems to have lost his sense of proportion. Now that mainstream culture has moved on from big debates about evolution and theism, he no longer has a prominent foe that so perfectly suits his singular talent for explaining the creative power of biology. And so he’s playing whack-a-mole, swinging full strength, and without much discernment, at anything that strikes him as even vaguely irrational. His fans at the Warner Theatre didn’t seem to mind. For all I know, some of them had come with the sole intent of hearing Dawkins weigh in on the latest campus disputes and cancellations. After he took his last bow, the lights went out, and I tried to understand what I was feeling. I didn’t leave the show offended. I wasn’t upset. It was something milder than that. I was bored.