There is an unusual piece of parchment displayed among the doctorates, awards and academic paraphernalia that adorn the walls of Dr Richard Dawkins's lavish Oxford home. In one frame, the Universal Life Church announces that Reverend Dawkins is a bona fide preacher of the gospel faith. Not a bad qualification for the nation's angriest atheist, a self-appointed devil's chaplain who says creationists are 'ignorant, stupid, insane or simply wicked'.
However, it transpires the certificate - which allows Dawkins to absolve sins and officiate at weddings - was downloaded from the Universal Life Church's website, though the zoologist's decision to display it on his toilet wall is perhaps eccentric. The move suggests, if nothing else, there may be a hidden, jovial hinterland to a man usually noted for his chilly rhetoric, combative debating and belief that human beings are 'robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve their genes'.
Certainly, Dawkins - whose latest book, The Ancestor's Tale, is published next month - can be cold and haughty. He lists 'the Apple Macintosh' as his only recreation in Who's Who, and he can undoubtedly put the boot in when it comes to taking on the church, describing religious affiliations as 'the most inflammatory, enemy-labelling device in history'. He is also an unashamed elitist, passionately defending the role of Oxbridge as a bastion of the nation's education, and has been a powerful voice for the need for intellectual clarity in national debates over the Iraq war, faith schools, MMR and autism and other key issues. It is scarcely surprising he has just been voted Britain's top intellectual by readers of Prospect magazine.
But Dawkins, whose handsome, fresh-faced appearance belies his 63 years, can also be touchingly loyal and warm. He was a devoted friend to the humourist and author Douglas Adams, and spoke movingly about his death three years ago: 'Science has lost a friend, literature has lost a luminary ... and I have lost an irreplaceable intellectual companion and one of the kindest and funniest men I ever met.'
And in his book Climbing Mount Improbable, Dawkins recalls waking his daughter Juliette, then two, one night and carrying her in a blanket to look at Halley's Comet. 'She didn't take in what I was saying, but I stubbornly whispered into her ear the story of the comet and the certainty that I could never see it again, but that she might when she was 78.' It is a moving image, far removed from the picture most of us have of the scourge of the Church and the arch-enemy of woolly thinking. But then nothing about Dawkins is ever simple.
Born Clinton Richard Dawkins in 1941 in Kenya, into a family of colonial forest officers, Dawkins was sent to board at Oundle when his father returned to England after inheriting a farm near Chipping Norton. The boy did well, but not brilliantly, though his love of biology quickly revealed itself, as did his antipathy to religion, with one housemaster warning school authorities that by forcing the lad to attend chapel they were doing him 'positive harm'.
Dawkins was accepted by Balliol College, Oxford, and studied zoology under Niko Tinbergen, the Dutch Nobel prize-winning ethologist, and a major scientific influence for the young researcher. Tinbergen had already outlined the notion that plants and animals could be described as survival machines for genes. Dawkins was later to develop this idea with spectacular success.
After Oxford, Dawkins was spotted at a conference by George Barlow of the University of California, Berkeley. He noted the researcher 'had the audience in the palm of his hand' (Dawkins remains an arresting debater). Barlow offered him an assistant professorship. Dawkins accepted and arrived with his bride, Marian Stamp, also a biologist. The pair lived happily with the Barlows, delighting their children by eating jelly and peanut butter sandwiches - a new culinary delight - with knives and forks, and enraptured the family with their geeky but unselfconscious behaviour.
Dawkins returned to New College, Oxford, in 1970. A few years later, Ted Heath's three-day week left the energetic young scientist with time on his hands, so he wrote The Selfish Gene. It transformed his life. In the book, Dawkins developed Tinbergen's ideas about survival machines and reworked them to incorporate the ideas of natural selection. Evolution operates not at the level of individual animals, said Dawkins, but at the level of the genes that control animals' behaviour and development.
The book is now rated a scientific classic, grabbing readers with its opening sentence - 'Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence' - and pulling them effortlessly through mazes of complex ideas. Most young biologists cite the book as a key influence on their careers. The book was also critical in starting a renaissance in science writing and a new appreciation of science itself.
The Selfish Gene's basic theme - that we are prisoners of our DNA - was also seized by free-marketeers who thought it somehow backed their beliefs about laissez-faire economics and who suspected the rather arrogant-looking Dawkins might be one of their own. They were to be quickly disabused. Dawkins is a liberal to his core. In the US he had worked for Eugene McCarthy's presidential campaign, and had taken part in anti-war marches. Nor have his views been diluted. He retains a hatred of President Bush (that now encompasses Tony Blair) which he has outlined in streams of anti-war letters to newspapers.
Subsequent books included The Extended Phenotype and The Blind Watchmaker, the latter winning him a 1986 Royal Society of Literature award. Dawkins is, as one interviewer noted, capable of writing 'with a compelling first-person directness - yet he is also capable of being peculiarly un-engaging in person'. This view is harsh, though there is no hiding Dawkins's inability to make small talk or suffer fools gladly. He is spectacularly combative, picking fights not just with churchmen but other evolutionary biologists, in particular the late Harvard palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould.
The two clashed violently over Gould's ideas that evolution proceeds in strange jumps and starts, known as the theory of punctuated equilibrium. Dawkins denounced Gould's ideas and writing as being filled with 'forced analogies that obscure rather than illuminate' and 'bad scientific poetry' (a real Dawkins put down). Their battle divided US and UK researchers into deeply divided camps (Steve Pinker and Daniel Dennett with Dawkins, Steve Rose and Richard Lewontin with Gould) and is considered one of science's most unpleasant disputes. Yet few who have sneered at the combatants ever mention Dawkins's essay, written knowing that Gould was dying, in which he pays tribute to the brilliant scholarship of his once bitter rival.
He is now married to his third wife, Lalla Ward, the actress who played Romana, one of Dr Who's plucky assistants, having been divorced from Stamp, and later from Eve Barham, mother of Dawkins's only child.
In 1995 he was given an Oxford chair, endowed by Microsoft millionaire Charles Simonyi. He has maintained his fusillades of anti-cleric abuse, once utterly crushing the Bishop of Oxford, Richard Harries (a former scientist), in a debate over the common ground that exists between science and religion (no guessing what Dawkins's view was).
Dawkins says he is now no longer so aggressive, a claim that is manifestly untrue. In his last book, A Devil's Chaplain, he quotes with relish a Spectator review that 'to be Dawkinsed is not just to be dressed down or duffed up: it is to be squelched, pulverised, annihilated, rendered into suitably primordial paste.'
You can see Dawkins preening at those words, for he is, above all, an intellectual pugilist perpetually looking for logical inconsistencies he can quash. Of all past intellectuals, he is like Thomas Huxley, the pugnacious academic 'bulldog' who defended Darwin's theory of natural selection and who so effectively trounced that other Bishop of Oxford, Sam Wilberforce, in the great evolution debates of the 19th century.
Or to bring him up to date, we should maybe think of him as the Dirty Harry of science. You don't assign him. You just let him loose.
Richard Dawkins
Full name: Clinton Richard Dawkins
DoB: 26 March 1941, Kenya
Education: Oundle School; Balliol, Oxford (MA, DPhil, Msc)
Publications: The Selfish Gene (1976); The Extended Phenotype (1982); The Blind Watchmaker (1986); River Out of Eden (1995); A Devil's Chaplain (2003)