Dawkins said :

“One day – I must have been about 11 – there was a master in the gallery with me. He pulled me onto his knee and put his hand inside my shorts. He did no more than have a little feel, but it was extremely disagreeable … as well as embarrassing,” he told the publication. “As soon as I could wriggle off his lap, I ran to tell my friends, many of whom had had the same experience with him. I don’t think he did any of us any lasting damage, but some years later he killed himself.”

“I am very conscious that you can’t condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours,”"Just as we don’t look back at the 18th and 19th centuries and condemn people for racism in the same way as we would condemn a modern person for racism, I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild pedophilia, and can’t find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today.”

“The most notorious cases of pedophilia involve rape and even murder, and because we attach the label ‘pedophilia’ to the same things when they’re just mild touching up, we must beware of lumping all pedophiles into the same bracket,”

I don't read that as a defense of pedophilia rather a plea for balance.

He speaks from his own experience and has formed a general opinion.

Men, women and children frequently get touched in ways they would prefer not to. But to equate that with rape because the recipient is a child is noncesense.

He is also making a statement about how we view the past.

Getting back on topic somewhat in Biblical times 12 year olds married 30 year olds.

If Mary and Joseph were real people this was probably their age range.

We don't approve now but it was the norm then.

The endurance of a meme says nothing about it's moral qualities.

Certain ethnic stereotypes have endured for centuries but that doesn't make them good or accurate.