An Appetite for Wonder

Title: An Appetite for Wonder – The Making of a Scientist, A Memoir

Author: Richard Dawkins

Publisher: Bantam Press, 2013 (First)

ISBN: 978-0-593-07090-1

Pages: 309

To atheists, agnostics and scientifically minded people all over the world, Richard Dawkins is in a class of his own. A famous professor of Zoology and the author of many best-selling books on popular science – many of which have already been reviewed in this blog – Dawkins is an icon of rational thought and liberal ideas. He is a prolific writer having a sizable following in the social media too. It may also be safely concluded that his work on free thought forms the zeitgeist of tomorrow. This book is an autobiography that illustrates how a young boy born to educated parents and born in Africa had gone on to the pinnacle of scientific glory as a great populariser of it. This book is planned as a two-volume work, with the next in the sequel expected within two years. The first volume, though it is not denoted as such, covers the period from Dawkins’ birth in 1941 to 1976 in which his first book, ‘The Selfish Gene’ was published. His books are always renowned for the clarity of thought and anyone who has read at least one book of Dawkins should read this biography to happily note that the same clarity filling the pages of this one too. The author has been very candid in describing some of the anecdotes, which brings the readers closer to his heart.

The book exposes the wide practical experience colonialism had been instrumental in bestowing on the people fortunate enough to live on the right side of the fence. It plucked young Englishmen from their sylvan countrysides and flung them to the remotest corners of the globe in which the sun never set. Many members of the Dawkins family took up lucrative postings at widely varying locales in Kenya, Malawi, India and Burma, the author himself was born in present-day Malawi in Africa. Though initially burdened with long spells of absence from home and tough living conditions where the itinerary included fending off wild animals and epidemics like malaria, this put the people in an advantageous position to take up any vexing challenge that came on their way and to make a successful career. They became the adopted children of the new lands they inhabited, and the author narrates an incident when his family visited England on vacation while he was still very young. The home country did not evoke much impression on him when they first arrived, the young boy put off by the extreme cold and rain. The first question he posed to his mother after setting foot on English soil was when they were going back!

Dawkins brings up a lively picture of his school life that was filled with rich and variegated experience accumulated at various institutions in Africa and England. One thing the reader immediately notices from the candid descriptions of what went on in the young boy’s mind when he was called upon to act on unfamiliar circumstances i

s the resemblance to any other child on a similar occasion. Dawkins is undoubtedly the world’s most renowned living atheist, but the signs of budding skepticism were not seen in the young boy, who admits that he was very religious at the age of 13. This statement of the fact is a roaring indictment against the present pattern of things in which children are subjected to religious teaching when they are not even fit enough to separate wheat from chaff. Through sermons and suggestions, the unreasonable adults inculcate unquestioned belief in young minds, causing lasting damage. The author lashes out at believers on more than one occasion at their perceived inability to distinguish metaphor from reality. Being religious, the young Dawkins was superstitious too. It may come as comforting to many of today’s children to know that the author was also scared of ghosts in his childhood. Presumably, that is not a trait that can’t be bypassed in the stages through which you grow up and is not a thing to be ashamed of.

The author makes a sudden switchover to serious topics when he describes his life in the university. Joining Balliol College, he was successful in establishing his credentials on the cutting edge of zoological research. However, the camaraderie and pleasant unconcern that marked his entertaining narrative on school life suddenly vanishes and the readers are forced to listen to the abstracts of his research papers in those days and explanations of the underlying concepts with illustrations and graphs! Being an expert on Animal Behaviour, the text assumes the domineering tone of lecturing and the readers find this section rather dull. After all, this book is not meant for the exposition of Dawkins’ ideas, but for obtaining an intimate and informal familiarity with Dawkins the man and what made him the way he is now. Gestures of blowflies and pecking of chicks could wait. This part also brings to light the author’s taste and skill for computer programming. He fell in love with computers from an early age and developed both hardware and software to automate collection of data for his projects on animal behaviour. Such skill, rarely seen in a student of life sciences conveys great promise for future research in all related areas. This also gives a true picture of the depth to which computers have been assimilated as a research tool in life sciences as well as the more exact physical sciences. However, the author’s lament that his old programs could no longer run on modern computers is a case of sheer understatement. He can always migrate it from Algol or Fortran to modern powerful languages like C++ or Java and get far more versatile results than the previous attempts.

Anyone reading the path breaking book, ‘The Selfish Gene’ won’t recognize that this was the author’s first ever book. So eloquent and confident were his arguments in that supremely effective volume which first saw light in 1976. Dawkins devotes a full chapter to tell the story of how it was conceived and the immediate stimulant to go headlong into writing after taking a sabbatical. Coal miners in England called a strike in 1973 demanding better conditions and power generation was seriously hit by shortages of coal. Power cuts became frequent and all projects undergoing at Oxford which relied on continuity of electric supply – like the author’s – suffered terribly. He temporarily called off the project and devoted his time fully to complete the first few chapters. It is curious to learn that the front cover of the first edition of ‘The Selfish Gene’ was done by the equally famous author Desmond Morris who was also a talented painter.

Dawkinsian books contribute to literature too. The term, ‘meme’ first formulated in ‘The Selfish Gene’ has entered the Oxford Dictionary as a new word in the English language. In this title, he introduces another term, ‘dundridges’ to refer to obsessively rule-loving bureaucrats who cause hardships to people dealing with them. We may hope that this term will also find its way to the language. And we should use it often to support the author and to qualify the criteria for a new word – that is, it should be used without attribution or definition sufficiently many times in literature.

References to ideas expressed in the author’s research and books proved spoilsport for this excellent piece of autobiography. The book is, however, highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

A Study of History, Vol 6

Title: A Study of History, Vol 6 – The Disintegrations of Civilizations, Part 2

Author: Arnold Joseph Toynbee

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1985 (First published 1939)

ISBN: 978-0-19-215213-8

Pages: 633

Toynbee completes another episode of his legendary course of analyzing history in this sixth volume by making a thorough analysis of disintegration of societies that completes the theme started with the previous volume. Curious it may seem, but the challenges and responses faced by a growing society are numerous, but that of a disintegrating society is the same, in which the hapless constituents go about repeating or varying a response that is proving out and out ineffective. In this sorry state of affairs, epic figures arise with promises of change and transformation. The nature and scope of these new paths are studied and analysed in this volume. Though heavily coloured with a partisanship to Christianity and its philosophy, the book provides a deep understanding of the peculiar juncture in history when a higher religion spouts from a mixture of creativity and despair.

The book begins with a further enquiry into the nature and characteristics of a disintegrating society. Religion takes an interesting turn here. As noted in the previous volume, the disintegrating phase is noted for internecine warfare between the states which finally results in unification in the political realm in the form of a Universal State and an emperor displaying pretensions to divinity. In the theological arena too, the need for unity finds expression. Different godheads merge into a pantheon, or a jealous god obliterates all others and assumes the supreme position by itself. Yahweh, the Syriac god of Judaism and Christianity fought a pitched battle with other gods and goddesses like Isis, Cybele and Mithras. These latter godheads were accommodating in nature and willing to compromise for a cooperative existence. But Yahweh’s intransigence and intolerant jealousy carried it forward to destroy all opposition on the religious front. A comparison is immediately made to India’s own pantheon. At the end of Gupta period, when the civilization was disintegrating, Hinduism slowly converged on two foci of divinities in the form of Shiva and Vishnu. These gods still exist, for the lucky chance that they didn’t had had to contend with a competitor of the genre of Yahweh and both of them were willing to accommodate the other to a great extent.

Toynbee discusses four methods by which a society trying to evade the excruciating circumstances of the slide to disintegration. Archaism is a favourite option in which the society wants to go back to a real or perceived golden past. Obviously, they can’t turn the clock back, but the nearest that can be achieved is a reversion to old customs, rejuvenation of a ritual or language that existed during the hypothetical past. An illustrative case in point is that of Classical Greek language, which is termed Attic Koiny that was in everyday use in Athens during 5^th century BCE, when the Hellenic civilization was in its growth. Later scholars also used the same language for their literary work even though it had lost all touch with everyday reality in the sense that it was not intelligible to ordinary citizens of the Greek state. Attic Greek continued to be used in places geographically far away from Athens and in times which are distant from the Classical Age. Similar is the case with Indian Sanskrit. The author expresses the opinion that Indian epics were written in a language that had already become archaic at the time of writing them down. Futurism is a counterargument to Archaism in which the protagonists try to carry the society to a future age according to the ideals set down by a leader or a prophet. This movement provides a strong impetus to move to an as yet unclear future goal in which the present-day religion and customs may get transformed. But in the final analysis, this is also bound to fail. Detachment and Transformation are the other two choices available to a moribund society. The former applies to philosophers who maintain a detached state of mind as regards the society at large and transformationists seek to put together a transformed ideal for the society. Toynbee’s survey of saviours of society in the form of swordsmen, archaists and futurists ends with the glorification of Christ as a savior god and is projected as the ideal way forward for any society in disintegration. Feels like evangelization? Pretty much sounds like it! The book falls to the level of a religious treatise with quotations from the Bible running all over the text. May be this excessive sanctification of the Christian faith precludes any relevance to the ideas conveyed to a modern audience. The author’s culmination of Christ’s glorification is comic in the final remark: “As we stand and gaze with our eyes fixed upon the farther shore, a single figure rises from the flood and straightaway fills the whole horizon” (p.278)

The fundamental principle underlying the disintegration of a civilization was first enunciated in the previous volume (Vol 5), which is again clarified and established beyond doubt in this volume too. There is differentiation in the trajectories of societies in growth, as the growth phase is marked by Challenge and Response, in which the society goes on finding successful responses to the multitudinous challenges that are generated by the response to a previous challenge. But the disintegrative phase is marked by a colourless uniformity that applies equally well to all representatives of the species called civilizations. Here, the society is faced with a challenge, for which it is unable to come up with a solution. Many responses may be offered as solutions, but none of them suits the bill. This may go on till the civilization itself is dissolved in the turbulent state of affairs the society is forced to encounter. In any case, the steady slide to doom is not a continuous one. There are bound to be semi-victorious offerings occurring in the body social. Toynbee calls this Rout and Rally. When the society is faced with a rout that commonly appears as internecine warfare, there may be a rally to bring ecumenical peace in the form of a universal state, which is the rallying point. This is not permanent however, and is bound to end up in another rout, which is followed by another rally. After exactly three-and-a-half cycles of these phenomena of Rout and Rally, the civilization goes into irretrievable dissolution. A horde of examples modeled on various civilizations separated by vast tracts of time and geography stands testimony to this fact. The author illustrated the idea of differentiation in growth and uniformity in dissolution by recounting the brilliant parable of Penelope’s Web from Greek legend. Penelope’s husband, Odysseus, had gone to war and the lady is faced with the prospect of suitors claiming her hand in marriage, which is repugnant to her as she is loyal to her husband in exile. She agrees to marry them, but only after finishing the weaving of the burial shroud of her father-in-law. For three years, she sets about the task, weaving in daytime and secretly untangling the threads at night, so that the work is delayed indefinitely. She has an infinite number of patterns to weave the fabric into, but exactly only one way in which to draw the threads apart to destroy what she had done in the day. Similar is the case with civilizations in their growth and disintegrative phases respectively.

The most notable part of this volume is a 164-page annex titled ‘Christus Patiens’ that makes a careful study of the Gospels and the seemingly close resemblance they maintain with the legends associated to pagan, Hellenic heores, divinities, historical personages or demigods. The author identifies 89 points of corrsespondence between the synoptic Gospels and identical narratives of the lives of Agis, Cleomenes, the Gracchi and also that of Alexander, Socrates and Plato. A close similarity to the mythical hero Hercules is also sewed up into the sequence. However, he does not accuse the writers of the Gospels of plagiarism. These legends were transmitted to various parts of the Hellenic world through folk lore from a common source which might be Hellenic in origin. A possible route may be through Alexandria in the post-Alexandrine era and from there to Palestine through mercenary Jewish soldiers employed by the Ptolemaic regime. Alexandria was a melting pot of cultures with soldiers and scholars converging on the city from all parts of Greece, Egypt, Syria and the Achaemenian territories. What is really noteworthy is not the argument per se, but the immense amount of scholarship that has gone into this illuminating chapter that refers to myriads of Greek literary texts. This annex is a very valuable piece of scholarship that is rare in its comprehensive outlook. If someone is to look for the heart of this volume, this annex may undoubtedly be pointed out as the gem he is looking for.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star