Incurious Dawkins

Richard Dawkins’ An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of aScientist invites comparisons with C. S. Lewis’ Surprised by Joy.Both are memoirs by thinkers who seemed a little surprised to end up asapologists, much less as writers whom growing numbers would credit with theirconversion or de-conversion. Unfortunately, there is much more joy in Lewis’work than there is wonder in Dawkins’.

When Dawkins recounts stories from his childhood in Africaor schooling in England, he seldom enters into his thoughts or feelings. (Thevolume, first of a promised two, goes up to the publication of The SelfishGene in 1976, when Dawkins was a lecturer in zoology at Oxford.) The storyof his circumcision is used to set up an aside about German law. We learn abouthis frustration with legal accommodation of religion, but nothing about if andhow he had any personal feelings on the topic.

He writes of the “fortuitously well named” Dr. Trim, theperson presumably responsible for having him circumcised. “Obviously I wasn’tasked for my consent, but it seems my parents weren’t either. . . . Apparentlyit was the default presumption in Dr. Trim’s nursing home.” About the recentGerman court ruling that circumcising infants, even for religious reasons,violates their rights, he argues that the verdict “will probably be overruledbecause of the shrieks of protest that to prevent parents circumcising theirchildren is a violation of the parents’ rights to practice their religion.Significantly, no mention of the child’s rights. Religion enjoys astonishingprivileges in our ­societies, privileges denied to almost any other specialinterest group one can think of—and certainly denied to ­individuals.”

Dawkins speaks in defense of the rights of individuals, butthere are no people with thoughts and feelings in his anecdote. Hisinfant self can be excused for not having a reaction, but a memoirist addscontext to the stories he tells by reflecting on their impact on his presentself. Yet Dawkins remains ­impassive.

A boat trip he took with his family on which his sister losther blanket in a storm becomes an occasion not for discussing her feelings orhis, but for another quick flight to abstraction: “[Comfort blankets] seem tobe held in a position to be smelled while thumb- or finger-sucking. I suspectthere is a connection to the research of Harry Harlow on rhesus monkeys andcloth mother-substitutes.”

He does not explain the reference, even in a footnote.Perhaps he expects all of his readers to be familiar with the experiment: HarryHarlow isolated baby rhesus monkeys from their mothers, and offered them achoice of a pseudo-mother made out of wire or one that was covered in cloth.Even when only the wire mother could feed them, they still clung to the clothmother for comfort.

Explaining Harlow’s research would be a way to invite thereader into Dawkins’ thought process, perhaps to awaken a shared sense ofwonder at the way humans ape monkeys. But the dangling references simply leaveus wondering what Dawkins is wondering at.

His writing picks up considerably by the time he is inuniversity and has research to explain. Dawkins can draw the reader into thedescription of a fly washing its feet as he explains how recording and studyingits ­movements helped him understand the way simple animals can enact complexbehaviors. But he con­tinues to neglect the mechanisms driving the creatureostensibly under his ­microscope: himself.

Dawkins writes off his involvement with the People’s Parkprotest as a young teacher at Berkeley as “a trumped-up excuse for radicalpolitical activism for its own sake.” He strains to find sympathy with his pastself: “I try to peer into my own state of mind in my twenties in Berkeley ashonestly as I can. I think what I see there is a kind of youthful excitement atthe very idea of rebellion.”

He complains about his poor taste in books as a child(“[not] much to do with philosophy or the meaning of life or other such deepquestions”), his lack of reflection in failing to notify his school kitchen itwas his birthday, and thus missing the chance to have a cake (“perhaps Ithought it materialized by super natural magic”), and his first enthusiasm forcomputer programming as an adult (“bore the same relation to seriousprogramming as my tootling in the Oundle music school bore to real music”).

Each recollection is faintly scornful, but he does not pauseto dissect and diagnose his errors. If he wants to tutor his fans in criticalthinking, he could serve them well by working through his errors with the sameattention to detail he gives his ­experiments.

What questions should he have asked? And what should havebeen the trigger to notice that he was on the verge of a mistake or amisunderstanding? He heaps scorn on his teenage self for believing aclassmate’s claim that people who are hit by lightning are unaware of the factfor up to fifteen minutes, but complains, “Shouldn’t children be taughtcritical, skeptical thinking from an early age? Shouldn’t we all be taught todoubt, to weigh up plausibility, to demand evidence?”

Part of critical thinking is storytelling, imagining andextending alternatives and noticing how your predictions clash or match withthe world around you. Dawkins is adept at this process when it comes to hisbiology research, but not when reflecting on everyday life.

Ignorance is seldom willful, and understanding our ownerrors, even if we believe we’ve grown out of them, can help us lend a hand toa friend who is stuck, instead of simply being relieved we are no longer sogullible. But Dawkins does not seem as ready to use his own small errors as a lenson human thinking as he is to describe the mechanics of a duck’s drinkingposture.

Moments of pure joy and wonder were what moved C. S. Lewisto believe there must be some kind of God that could fulfill this inbornlonging. I am of a much less Franciscan temperament than Lewis, and I haveseldom found my moments of joy in a landscape, English or otherwise.

Like Dawkins, I tend to find them in science, mathematics,and computer science—the moments where all your theorizing comes together andyou have a sense of the delicate machinery whirring along beneath the world.Or, better yet, when your theory fails its test, and even an error is a pieceof data, an invitation to keep looking and inquiring.

Mathematicians are often accused of being secret Platonists becausethey firmly believe that a proof will turn out to have some elegant form; thattruth and beauty are yoked together. I’ve spent enough time in math departmentsto have acquired the same hope. When I look at the inelegant or ugly acts ofcruelty, carelessness, or uncharity committed against me or by me, I try tokeep prying them apart, trusting that there is some kind of misdirected love attheir heart, and that it’s worth understanding what went awry and trying to fixit. Dawkins’ memoir seems to lack this expectation of the beauty of allmechanisms, including those of the human heart.

Another memoir from another well-known, atheisticpopularizer of science could make a better claim on Dawkins’ title. In SurelyYou’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, physicist Richard Feynman conveys aninsatiable appetite for wonder, as lock-picking, spinning plates, bongos, and,of course, physics catch his attention and ours. Feynman shares his joy atbeing able to misunderstand the world well enough to make predictions, watchthem fail, refine his understanding, and learn.

A reader looking for the making of a scientist would bebetter served by picking up Feynman’s book or Dawkins’ own writing on naturalscience like The Selfish Gene. In his memoir, Dawkins has too little curiosityabout himself to stir the ­imagination. 

Leah Libresco is an editorial assistant at the American Conservative and blogs about religion at Unequally Yoked.