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Why Dawkins thought twice

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In a Newsnight interview the other day, scientist Richard Dawkins was challenged about a tweet he wrote in 2013 that the entire Muslim population had won fewer Nobel prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge.

When asked by presenter Evan Davis why he had made such an invidious comparison, the scientist revealed he had not originally intended to mention the college.

While dining a few months earlier with the then Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks, he had been astonished to learn that between a fifth and a quarter of Nobel science laureates had been Jewish.

"I wanted to make this point that Islam has stagnated in the scientific field since the Middle Ages," he told Newsnight. "And the best comparison to make would have been with Jews. I thought, 'Oh no, I can't do that because that will really upset people because of Palestine and I am very sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinian people in Israel.' So at the last minute I crossed out Jews and stuck in Trinity College, Cambridge."

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