Ten Questions with Richard Dawkins

The evolutionary biologist on new words, his education and, of course, God

Sam Frost / The Guardian

Your new memoir, An Appetite for Wonder , is mostly about your education. How would you explain the evolutionary advantage of teaching people to whom one is not related?
This is just one of the very many things which make humans very peculiar, and it's not just teaching--it's doing music, it's doing logic, it's doing mathematics, it's doing philosophy, it's writing books. Just about everything we do doesn't have a simple, naive, evolutionary explanation.

Does that mean they don't fit with neo-Darwinist theories?
All those things fit it, but in a very indirect way. We come into the world equipped...

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