It's back to basics this month, with a look at evolution, science and religion.
Last week I spent a fascinating morning at the Oxford home of the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, who has just published the first volume of his memoirs. I was there to talk to him about his life and work. Although 11 of his 12 books have been about evolution, he is now well known for his attacks on religion and religious explanations of the world — and much of our chat was about that.
On the train back to London I came across a new paper by Atsushi Iriki, a Japanese neurobiologist based at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Saitama Prefecture whose work I've followed with interest for years. His new findings offer an answer to a long-debated question regarding human evolution. Then — and here's the point of my name-dropping reference to Dawkins — I saw that Iriki's work had been appropriated and twisted by a website offering biblical explanations for the world.