BOOK REVIEW: An Appetite For Wonder – The Making of A Scientist (A Memoir)

BOOK REVIEW: An Appetite For Wonder – The Making of A Scientist (A Memoir)

Titled: An Appetite For Wonder – The Making of A Scientist (A Memoir)
Author: Richard Dawkin
Publisher: Bantam Press
Pages: 308 pages
Price: R275

British naturalist and world famous atheist, Richard Dawkins has been accused of many things over the years. He has been Darwin’s Rottweiler, anti–God and other contrarian names. One thing he cannot be accused of is having lived an ineffective life. He was born in Nairobi Kenya to father who was an agricultural civil servant in the British Colonial service in Malawi, then Nyasaland.

Dawkins shot to world fame and prominence in 1976 with the publication of his seminal book on the gene-centred view of evolution, The Selfish Gene. He followed that ground-breaking text with other works that solidified his stature as a scientist. However, it was a controversial book that perhaps ensured his infamy. Published in 2006, the book is contentiously titled, The God Delusion. The focus of the book is to argue the almost certain nonexistence of a supernatural creator and that religious faith is a delusion, which he describes as, “a fixed false belief.” Naturally, the text has earned the indignation of believers the world over. A reaction he has retorted often with the tone of a benevolent adult bent on disabusing maturing children of their fascination with Santa Clause or the Easter Bunny.  Many of the often incensed believers have wondered what on earth shaped a man into what Dawkins has been.

Well, the publication of his memoirs An Appetite For Wonder – The Making of A Scientist may just go the distance in understanding the forces and circumstances that birthed him forth.

However, it takes us only as far as the writing of The Selfish Gene. It does not take us into his later life to discover and understand how he became the antitheist and took on the God question. However, there’s satisfaction in the surprisingly intimate and moving account with which Dawkins takes us into the details of his early years. The discovery of his lifelong love for poetry which is a pleasure his reveals was given to him by both his mother and father; The many wonderings through the African bush with animals in the company of friends and some servants. He would accompany his father who was a botanist, and certainly also a naturalist, like many Dawkins relatives.

At doctoral level of his learning, Dawkins became fascinated by computers, which had just hit the scene in the 1960s. It also stands that the man who would be best known for his biologist credentials was also a skilled programmer. His natural habitat seems to have been the laboratory, and he would probably have been happy to have been described as a “geek” if the word had existed then. However, thanks to his mother’s encouragement, his love of verse turned him into a rare kind of geek, the type who could write. This is an ability that has in part guaranteed his global celebrity. The main ideas of the The Selfish Gene were not new, however. It is accepted that the initial research on which the book was based were published as early as 1964 by WD Hamilton. George C Williams published an academic work in 1966 that was also concerned with the gene agenda. The difference can be accounted for in sheer commercial drive and writing skills. The same skills have been deployed in this memoir.

Percy Mabandu