For a good interview of Richard Dawkins, see this article in Slate:
The Man Behind the MemeRichard Dawkins, champion of Darwinism and scourge of religion, is a courtly and attractive man, although not much given to humor. If one finds oneself smiling frequently in the presence of this Oxford don—who was recently voted Britain's No. 1 public intellectual—it is out of sheer enjoyment at his gift for rendering the most subtle evolutionary ideas absolutely lucid.
The other week, Dawkins was in New York to promote his book The Ancestor's Tale. I had the chance to chat with him for an hour or so in the lobby of his hotel, as a particularly noisome soft-jazz Muzak system droned in the background.
Dawkins' new book doesn't push a thesis about evolution, the way his earlier ones did. Instead, it lays out a set of facts about the history of life on Earth in a particularly clever order. The guiding conceit (inspired by the Canterbury Tales) is that of a pilgrimage heading backward in time to the very origin of life. Along the way, we humans meet up with other modern species at various points where we share a common ancestor. Surprisingly, it turns out that there are only 39 such rendezvous points. The first lies 6 million years in the past, when we encounter chimpanzees and bonobos (who themselves had already joined up at a common ancestry point a mere 2 million years ago). The last is where we meet up with bacteria at the pilgrimage's ultimate goal, the beginning of life. At each rendezvous point, one of the pilgrim species with whom we join forces tells a tale that illustrates some principle of evolution.
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http://slate.msn.com/id/2110249/
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