An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist

An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist

by Richard Dawkins
An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist

An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist

by Richard Dawkins

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Overview

New York Times bestselling author and renowned atheist and evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins delivers an intimate look into his own childhood and intellectual development, illuminating his path to becoming one of the foremost thinkers in modern science today

“A memoir that is funny and modest, absorbing and playful. Dawkins has written a marvelous love letter to science . . . and for this, the book will touch scientists and science-loving persons . . . Enchanting.” —NPR
 
 

Richard Dawkins’s first book, The Selfish Gene, was an immediate sensation and dramatically shifted the study of biology by offering a gene-centered view of evolution. Published in 1976, the book transformed the way we think about genes and evolution and has sold more than a million copies. In 2006, Dawkins transformed the world’s cultural and intellectual landscape again with The God Delusion, a scientific dismantling of religion. It was a New York Times bestseller and has sold more than two million copies worldwide. An Appetite for Wonder is Dawkins’s insightful memoir examining his own evolution as a man and as a thinker. From his beginnings in colonial Kenya to his intellectual awakening at Oxford, Dawkins shares his path to the creation of The Selfish Gene, and offers readers an in-depth look at the man and the mind that has changed the way we view science and evolution.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780062225818
Publisher: HarperCollins
Publication date: 09/24/2013
Sold by: HARPERCOLLINS
Format: eBook
Pages: 320
File size: 5 MB

About the Author

About The Author
RICHARD DAWKINS is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford and was the University of Oxford's Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008. He is the author of 15 books includingUnweaving the Rainbow, A Devil’s Chaplain, and The God Delusion.Dawkins lives in Oxford.,

Read an Excerpt

Appetite for Wonder, An


By

HarperCollins Publishers

Copyright © 2013 Richard Dawkins
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-06-222579-5


GENES and
Pith helmets
CHAPTER
1

AN APPETITE FOR WONDER
2

'GLAD to know you, Clint.' The friendly passport controller was
not to know that British people are sometimes given a
family name first, followed by the name their parents wanted them
to use. I was always to be Richard, just as my father was always John.
Our first name of Clinton was something we forgot about, as our
parents had intended. To me, it has been no more than a niggling
irritation which I would have been happier without (notwithstand-
ing the serendipitous realization that it gives me the same initials as
Charles Robert Darwin). But alas, nobody anticipated the United
States Department of Homeland Security. Not content with
scanning our shoes and rationing our toothpaste, they decreed that
anyone entering America must travel under his first name, exactly as
written in his passport. So I had to forgo my lifelong identity
as Richard and rebrand myself Clinton R. Dawkins when booking
tickets to the States – and, of course, when filling in those important
forms: the ones that require you explicitly to deny that you are
entering the USA in order to overthrow the constitution by force of
arms. ('Sole purpose of visit' was the British broadcaster Gilbert
Harding's response to that; nowadays such levity will see you banged
up.)
Clinton Richard Dawkins, then, is the name on my birth
CHAPTER
3

certificate and passport, and my father was Clinton John. As it
happened, he was not the only C. Dawkins whose name appeared in
The Times as the father of a boy born in the Eskotene Nursing Home,
Nairobi, in March 1941. The other was the Reverend Cuthbert
Dawkins, Anglican missionary and no relation. My bemused mother
received a shower of congratulations from bishops and clerics in
England, unknown to her but kindly calling down God's blessings
upon her newborn son. We cannot know whether the misdirected
benedictions intended for Cuthbert's son had any improving effect
on me, but he became a missionary like his father and I became a
biologist like mine. To this day my mother jokes that I might be the
wrong one. I am happy to say that more than just my physical
resemblance to my father reassures me that I am not a changeling,
and was never destined for the church.
Clinton first became a Dawkins family name when my great-
great-great-grandfather Henry Dawkins (1765–1852) married
Augusta, daughter of General Sir Henry Clinton (1738–95), who, as
Commander-in-Chief of British forces from 1778 to 1782, was
partly responsible for losing the American War of Independence.
The circumstances of the marriage make the commandeering of his
name by the Dawkins family seem a bit cheeky. The following
extract is from a history of Great Portland Street, where General
Clinton lived.
In 1788 his daughter eloped from this street in a hackney-coach
with Mr Dawkins, who eluded pursuit by posting half a dozen
other hackney-coaches at the corners of the street leading into
Portland Place, with directions to drive off as rapidly as possible,
each in a different direction . . .1
AN APPETITE FOR WONDER
4
1 H. B Wheatley and P. Cunningham, London Past and Present (London, Murray, 1891), vol. 1,
p. 109.

I wish I could claim this ornament of the family escutcheon as
the inspiration for Stephen Leacock's Lord Ronald, who '. . . flung
himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions'. I'd also
like to think that I inherited some of Henry Dawkins's resourceful-
ness, not to mention his ardour. This is unlikely, however, as only
one 32nd part of my genome is derived from him. One 64th part is
from General Clinton himself, and I have never shown any military
leanings. Tess of the D'Urbervilles and The Hound of the Baskervilles
are not the only works of fiction that invoke hereditary 'throwbacks'
to distant ancestors, forgetting that the proportion of genes
shared is halved with every gener ation and therefore dies away
exponentially – or it would if it were not for cousin-marriage, which
becomes ever more frequent the more distant the cousinship, so that
we are all more or less distant cousins of each other.
It is a remarkable fact, which you can prove to yourself without
leaving your armchair, that if you go back far enough in a time
machine, any individual you meet who has any living human
descendants at all must be an ancestor of everybody living. When
your time machine has travelled sufficiently far into the past, every-
body you meet is an ancestor either of everybody alive in 2013 or of
nobody. By the method of reductio ad absurdum beloved of
mathematicians, you can see that this has to be true of our fishy
ancestors of the Devonian era (my fish has to be the same as your
fish, because the absurd alternative is that your fish's descendants
and my fish's descendants stayed chastely separate from each other
for 300 million years yet are still capable of interbreeding today).
The only question is how far back you have to go to apply that argu-
ment. Clearly not as far as our fishy forebears, but how far? Well,
hurdling swiftly over the detailed calculation, I can tell you that if
the Queen is descended from William the Conqueror, you quite
probably are too (and – give or take the odd illegitimacy – I know I
am, as does almost everybody with a recorded pedigree).
GENES AND PITH HELMETS
5

Henry and Augusta's son, Clinton George Augustus Dawkins
(1808–71) was one of the few Dawkinses actually to use the name
Clinton. If he inherited any of his father's ardour he nearly lost it in
1849 during an Austrian bombardment of Venice, where he was the
British consul. I have a cannonball in my possession, sitting on a
plinth bearing an inscription on a brass plate. I don't know whose is
the authorial voice
(Continues...)

Excerpted from Appetite for Wonder, An by . Copyright © 2013 Richard Dawkins. Excerpted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Genes and pith helmets 1

Camp followers in Kenya 27

The land of the lake 41

Eagle in the mountains 61

Farewell to Africa 71

Under Salisbury's spire 83

'And your English summer's done' 107

The spire by the Nene 117

Dreaming spires 147

Learning the trade 169

West Coast dreamtime 203

Computer fix 213

The grammar of behaviour 241

The immortal gene 257

Looking back down the path 285

Acknowledgements 295

Text and picture acknowledgements 296

Index 299

What People are Saying About This

Steven Pinker

One of the greatest nonfiction writers alive today. --Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of Our Nature and How the Mind Works

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