When we meet in the House of Lords, Professor Richard Dawkins has just addressed a cross-party parliamentary gathering of politicians and researchers. He is wearing a tie embossed with a DNA double helix which is the perfect accessory for the occasion, because what he’s here to remind Whitehall of is basic science.
There’s a kind of Puritan revulsion against even discussing certain things and you can essentially be cancelled just for inviting discussion
In his speech to the politicians, Dawkins railed against the ‘debauching of language’ and the assault on science and reason. In particular, he took aim at Gender Studies Professor Anne Fausto-Sterling for her nonsensical argument that ‘sex in humans is a non-binary continuum’.
‘There are two sexes’, he said. ‘Exactly two sexes and only two sexes.’
That Dawkins should feel the need to explain this to a roomful of educated adults is an indictment of the times in which we are living. ‘My view is that if you are a logical rational person who thinks about science, it’s quite hard to believe in anything supernatural and it’s quite hard to believe that the sexes are not real, because in both cases, science and reason point in the same way,’ he tells me.
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