Author and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins on new words, his education and, of course, God

摘要

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, fust 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 with brains that were shaped by Darwinian natural selection to help us to survive under our wild conditions, which were the Pleistocene plains of Africa. Our brains had abilities and mechanisms like setting up goals and reciprocation arrangements, which cement our relationships with other people. And now that our brains find themselves in a totally alien environment, which has been built up by centuries of cultural history, only in a very indirect way can you interpret the sorts of things [we do].