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The Making of a Scientist
Ecco
October 2013
On Sale: September 24, 2013
320 pages
ISBN: 0062225790
EAN: 9780062225795
Kindle: B00BATKPBE
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Memoir
With the 2006 publication of The God Delusion, the
name Richard Dawkins became a byword for ruthless skepticism
and "brilliant, impassioned, articulate, impolite" debate
(San Francisco Chronicle). his first memoir offers
a more personal view. His first book, The Selfish
Gene, caused a seismic shift in the study of biology by
proffering the gene-centered view of evolution. It was also
in this book that Dawkins coined the term meme, a
unit of cultural evolution, which has itself become a
mainstay in contemporary culture. In An Appetite
for Wonder, Richard Dawkins shares a rare view into his
early life, his intellectual awakening at Oxford, and his
path to writing The Selfish Gene. He paints a vivid
picture of his idyllic childhood in colonial Africa,
peppered with sketches of his colorful ancestors, charming
parents, and the peculiarities of colonial life right after
World War II. At boarding school, despite a near-religious
encounter with an Elvis record, he began his career as a
skeptic by refusing to kneel for prayer in chapel. Despite
some inspired teaching throughout primary and secondary
school, it was only when he got to Oxford that his
intellectual curiosity took full flight. Arriving at
Oxford in 1959, when undergraduates "left Elvis behind" for
Bach or the Modern Jazz Quartet, Dawkins began to study
zoology and was introduced to some of the university's
legendary mentors as well as its tutorial system. It's to
this unique educational system that Dawkins credits his
awakening, as it invited young people to become scholars by
encouraging them to pose rigorous questions and scour the
library for the latest research rather than textbook
"teaching to" any kind of test. His career as a fellow and
lecturer at Oxford took an unexpected turn when, in 1973, a
serious strike in Britain caused prolonged electricity cuts,
and he was forced to pause his computer-based research.
Provoked by the then widespread misunderstanding of natural
selection known as "group selection" and inspired by the
work of William Hamilton, Robert Trivers, and John Maynard
Smith, he began to write a book he called, jokingly, "my
bestseller." It was, of course, The Selfish
Gene. Here, for the first time, is an intimate
memoir of the childhood and intellectual development of the
evolutionary biologist and world-famous atheist, and the
story of how he came to write what is widely held to be one
of the most important books of the twentieth century.
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