Darwinism and popular culture: Richard Dawkins to write "improving" children's literature

A friend points me to this item: "Harry Potter fails to cast spell over Professor Richard Dawkins" by Martin Beckford and Urmee Khan (Telegraph, 25 Oct 2008).

Where "Harry Potter has become the latest target for Professor Richard Dawkins who is planning to find out whether tales of witchdraft and wizardy have a negative effect on children." (Re spelling, sic)

Not if you go by my kids, decades ago. They regularly heard tales of talking, reasoning, elegant cats - and yet they lived with non-talking, non-reasoning, broad-beamed cats parked fatly under the radiator, stuffing heat into their bodies.

I cannot think of a single instance where any child confused the literary cat with the heat-hogging feline of everyday life.

Actually, the celebrated atheist and Darwinian spear carrier is becoming something of a legend in his own laundry room. In fact,

The prominent atheist is stepping down from his post at Oxford University to write a book aimed at youngsters in which he will warn them against believing in "anti-scientific" fairytales.

Yawn. Glad I'm not the hall monitor ...

Prof Dawkins is targeting children as the audience of his next project because he believes they are being "abused" by being taught about religion at school and labelled Christian, Jewish or Muslim from a young age.

Tell that to a kid celebrating First Communion/Bar Mitzvah/Bat Mitzvah ... .

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy: