Meet an out-of-the-closet atheist whose best-selling books provoke outrage and glee.

Richard Dawkins, aka "Darwin's fierce rottweiler," and some say the most controversial evolutionary biologist of our time, is in town to give the lecture "Queerer Than We Can Suppose: The Strangeness of Science," tonight at the University of Hawai'i.

Dawkins will suggest that the true nature of the universe eludes us because the human mind has evolved only to understand the "middle-sized" world we can observe.

The Charles Simonyi Professor of Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University in England is the author of several best-sellers on evolutionary biology, science and religion, including "The Selfish Gene" (Oxford University Press), which got a 30th anniversary edition in 2006 with a new introduction. His latest book is "The God Delusion" (Houghton Mifflin).

See a slice of Dawkins' lecture at www.ted.com.

Reach Chris Oliver at coliver@honoluluadvertiser.com.