Slate has an nice interview with Richard Dawkins. Same old, same old. But I have a question for the ladies: is Richard Dawkins handsome??? I see this assertion made, explicitly or implicitly about Dawkins now & then, and I wonder, is there something to this? I’ve been in a small lecture where Dawkins presented, about two dozen people, and I have to say he exuded an incredible amount of confidence, he seemed clearly an “alpha,” but I can’t attest to his looks (I like the ladies). Dawkins’ bold & brassy prose style and flashy flourishes mapped pretty well on to his speaking style and his public persona. In contrast, Steven Pinker was in private conversation a more shy and reserved individual than I would have expected from his books (I never saw him in lecture or listened to interviews).
I guess I’m asking if Richard Dawkins is the Naomi Wolf of evolutionary biologists? (he’s quite clearly a popularizer rather than a original thinker in the context of his own field of ethology & evolutionary biology from what I can tell)
Posted by razib at 06:30 PM