Richard Dawkins

Amid stacks of books in the front room of his house near Oxford University, writer and evolutionist Richard Dawkins points to a piece of memorabilia: A replica of the Australopithecus africanus skull known as "Mrs. Ples," a gift to him from a 1997 lecture in South Africa. Dawkins, who spent the first two years of his life in East Africa, still remembers the whitewashed huts his parents built near the Mbagathi River, a scene he calls his private Eden. "On a larger scale, Africa is Eden to us all," he writes.¹

For Dawkins, such metaphors are the basis of what he considers his gift to science: retelling the story of evolution in words that both inspire and instruct. Since publishing The Selfish Gene in 1976,2 Dawkins, 63, has won numerous honors for his work, and was named a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1997. Today, as Charles ...