won•der [wuhn-der] verb
1. to think or speculate curiously.
2. to be filled with admiration, amazement, or awe; marvel.
3. to doubt.
What a curious title Richard Dawkins chose for the first part of his memoir -- An Appetite for Wonder -- since he proceeds to make the case that he was never particularly filled with wonder as a child (a fact that was something of a disappointment to his wonder-filled parents). This should have been a fascinating life story: Dawkins was born in Africa at the twilight of the British Empire; he attended a British boarding school, complete with bullies, "fagging", and at least one pedophile; he studied at Oxford alongside of a lot of sciency people that he name-drops (I had only heard of Desmond Morris); he lectured at Berkley in the 60s and participated in some of the counter-culture there (which he now regrets as youthful naiveté); he returned to Oxford where he wrote some of the earliest computer programming; and he became a successful author, popularizing (if not originating) the contemporary genetic theories of the early 70s (although he did coin the word "meme") in The Selfish Gene.
It should have been fascinating, but that list I just typed is way more interesting and far less annoying than the unexamined, self-congratulatory, self-referencing bloviation that Dawkins compiled here. I listened to this on audiobook (which Dawkins himself narrated very well) and right now I can't find the quote, but when talking about the death of his mentor, Mike Cullen, Dawkins said something like, "His life cannot be summed up better than in the eulogy I wrote and delivered for him…" and then he delivers it again for us. I can find the quote that follows this up because it has been included in others' mocking reviews: ''I almost wept when I spoke that eulogy in Wadham chapel, and I almost wept again just now when rereading it 12 years later". If there's one thing we learn in An Appetite for Wonder, it's that Dawkins is often moved by his own thoughts and words.
But for the most part, this is quite a dull book (and especially the very long and detailed descriptions of experiments Dawkins performed at Oxford on chick-pecking and fly-grooming behaviours) with songs and poems and his positive book reviews thrown in (three bad reviews for The Selfish Gene were attributed to two left-wing extremists and one on the opposite side of the spectrum).
The subtitle of this book (The Making of a Scientist) is also just barely addressed -- Dawkins' father, a biologist and alumnus, pulled some strings to get his barely qualified son into Oxford, but since the young Dawkins didn't have the marks for Biochemistry, he was offered a spot in Zoology. After a lifetime of preferring novels to exploring the countryside and a school career of pointedly refusing to visit the observatory or to take advantage of the other "marvelous facilities", Dawkins allowed his father to pull some strings and make him a scientist (and, of course, this was a happy circumstance because I'm not denying that Dawkins has made many fine contributions).
Based on this book, Joseph Anton, and God is not Great I have come to the realisation that my idea of hell (which, ironically, none of the three authors believe in) would be to be locked in a room with Richard Dawkins, Salman Rushdie, and Christopher Hitchens as they debate which one of them is the greatest genius; a wonder for which I have zero appetite.
I should be generous and include the one story that I liked: Dawkins' grandparents lived on a farm on the coast of England, and when WWII broke out, it wasn't uncommon for them to see German bombers flying overhead as the planes returned home. Once, while Grandpa Dawkins was riding his bicycle, he saw a German bomber drop his payload on what, from his perspective, was the homestead where his family was. Overwrought, he threw his bicycle into the ditch and ran all the way home. That was an amazing image to me.
And I should also complain that Dawkins has plenty of venom when speaking about religion (ie, equating God with Santa as ways that we unfortunately undermine children's faculties for critical thinking). He even says that he believes that (as per a family joke) had he been swapped with another baby who had been born on the same day at the same hospital -- a boy born to religious missionaries -- he believes that he would still have been an atheist. I can't imagine what evolutionary advantage to genes it would be to be an atheist, but I suppose I'll need to defer to Dawkins' expertise here.
