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