Digging deeper
Richard Dawkins' memoir is intimate and moving, but skirts issue of why he took on religion
An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist
by Richard Dawkins
Bantam
4 stars
There are two types of biologist, and they can often be identified from early childhood: the naturalist and the experimentalist.
The naturalist thirsts after the names of animals and plants, even according their Latin tags an almost religious significance as if "Ranunculus" or "Tyrannosaurus" were the entry key to a secret society. The naturalist revels in the complexity and abundance of nature, and soon learns a huge roster of species names: the young Charles Darwin could not get enough of beetles or barnacles.
The experimentalist, on the other hand, strives to get below the surface of nature, to find how animals and plants really work beneath their taxonomy. Biodiversity becomes almost a distraction, because the real business is to find the right experimental organism, and then perform the right experiment on it. That's real science.
Richard Dawkins is assuredly a biologist of the second type. But this memoir takes us only as far as the man who wrote The Selfish Gene; it does not lead us into his later life to discover how he took on God.
He would probably have been happy to have been described as a "geek" if the word had existed then
Dawkins' account of his early years is surprisingly intimate and moving. His was the kind of childhood we might all dream of. His father was a botanist, and certainly also a naturalist, like many Dawkins relatives, and the early years were spent in Africa, wandering through the bush with animals, in the company of caring friends and a sprinkle of servants.