http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/sep/16/appetite-wonder-richard-dawkins-digested-read
An Appetite for Wonder by Richard Dawkins – digested read
John Crace reduces the autobiography of the God-fearless evolutionary biologist to a more manageable 600 words
The Guardian, John Crace. 16 September 2013
I was christened Clinton Richard Dawkins. By a strange quirk, Charles Darwin also has the initials CRD. I often think how proud he would have been to share them with me. Although, by reductio ad absurdum, everyone must be related to one another if you go back far enough, I propose to start this memoir with my grandfather, Clinton Evelyn, the first Dawkins to go to Balliol College, Oxford. The eulogy I wrote for his funeral still brings tears to my eyes.
My father also went to Balliol. My mother, being of Cornish origin, didn't, though I have often wondered about the evolution of the Cornish dialect. Her father wrote a book, Short Wave Wireless Communication, which was legendary in our family for its incomprehensibility, but I have just read the first two pages and find myself delighted by its lucidity in comparison to my own.
I was born in Nairobi in 1941, my father having been posted to Kenya by the colonial service. By all accounts, I was a sociable child and I have a clear memory of all the friends I made by pointing out the nature of their second-order meta-pretends while we were playing together. I also had a fondness for poetry and have only recently realised that some of the early, rhythmic verses I invented for myself are highly reminiscent of Ezra Pound.
After several peripatetic years, my family returned to England where I was sent to Chafyn Grove, an unremarkable preparatory school, where I frequently pretended to know less than I actually did. This, I now see, was early evidence of my peculiar empathy towards individuals who are much stupider than me. There was, of course, life beyond Chafyn Grove and I spent many happy holidays sorting out my father's collections of coloured bailer twine and serpentine pebble pendants.
My father had intended me to follow him to Marlborough, but his application on my behalf was too late and I was rejected – a sleight from which he never fully recovered, as I explained so movingly in my speech at his funeral. Instead, I went to Oundle boarding school and I shall never forget the shame I felt on my first day as a fag, after ringing the five-minute bell five minutes too late. For my many thousands of American readers, I should point out that fag in this context does not mean homosexual. Of course, some boys did make advances towards me, but I firmly believe there was nothing sexual about that. Likewise, Mr GF Bankerton-Banks whose preferred method of teaching was with his hands in a boy's pockets. No doubt in these more suspicious times, he would have been dismissed as a paedophile.
Some years ago, I was invited to give the inaugural Oundle lecture, in which I playfully invoked the ghost of a long-dead headmaster. I would like to make clear that this was just creative use of poetic imagery and in no way implies a belief in the supernatural. I may have once, shortly after my confirmation, been foolish enough to believe in the possibility of an intelligent designer, but I have long since exposed the pathetic fallacy of that belief.
Having taken up my anointed position at Balliol, I quickly became one of the most remarkable zoologists of my generation, and it was a surprise to find my work on chickens pecking at eggshells and crickets reacting to light sources didn't receive greater international acclaim. Not that Balliol was all work and no play. I did achieve my first sexual congress with a cellist and it was most gratifying to discover how biomechanically efficient my penis was.
I married my first wife Marian in 1967, though that's the last time I propose to mention her. Far more interesting are the two computer languages I invented to determine hierarchical embedment. Who would have guessed that P=2(P+P-P*P)-1?! In the early 1970s, I started work on The Selfish Gene. I had no idea when I was writing the first chapter just how remarkable the book would be, as it had seemed self-evident for more than a decade to me that panglossian theories were erroneous and that natural selection took place at the genetic level. What I hadn't then realised was my remarkable ability to be right about absolutely everything: the consequences of that realisation will follow in a later volume. Though you may be hoping a process of natural literary selection prevents that.
Digested read, digested: Me me meme.
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