Curious Minds by John Brockman

Author:John Brockman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780375423420
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2004-08-31T00:00:00+00:00

Dolittle and Darwin

RICHARD DAWKINS

RICHARD DAWKINS is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University and a Fellow of the Royal Society. His books include The Selfish Gene, Climbing Mount Improbable, Unweaving the Rainbow, and, most recently, A Devil’s Chaplain.

I wish I could say that my early childhood in East Africa turned me on to natural history in general and human evolution in particular. But it wasn’t like that. I came to science late. Through books.

My childhood was as near an idyll as you could expect, given that I was sent away to boarding school at seven. I survived that experience as well as the next boy, which means pretty well (some tragic exceptions were lost in the bullied tail of the distribution), and my excellent schooling finally got me into Oxford, that Athens of my riper age * Home life was genuinely idyllic, first in Kenya, then Nyasaland (Malawi), then England, on the family farm in Oxfordshire. We were not rich, but we weren’t poor either. We had no television, but that was only because my parents thought, with some justice, that there were better ways to spend time. And we had books.

Africa and the English countryside should have opened my eyes to the natural world and turned me into a biologist. I had no lack of encouragement from my parents, both of whom knew every wildflower you might encounter on a Cornish cliff path or an Alpine meadow, and my father amused my little sister and me by throwing in the Latin names for good measure. But to my lasting regret I showed no aptitude for natural history. I remember my mortification at the age of eight when my tall, handsome grandfather, seeing a blue tit on the feeder outside the window, asked me if I knew what it was. I didn’t, and miserably stammered something like “Is it a chaffinch?” Grandfather was scandalized at such ignorance, which, in his outdoors-loving, binoculars-toting, shorts-wearing, Empire-building family, was tantamount to not having heard of Shakespeare: “Good God, John”—I have never forgotten his words, nor my father’s sheepish efforts to excuse me—“is that possible?” My love of animals came not from watching them, still less from knowing their names, but from books—and not necessarily scientific ones.

I was a secret reader, and it became something of a vice; I would sneak up to my bedroom with a book when I was supposed to be out in the fresh air. Maybe obsessive reading imprints a love of words in a child, and perhaps later assists the craft of writing. In particular, I wonder whether the formative influence that eventually led to my becoming a zoologist might have been a children’s book: Hugh Lofting’s The Adventures of Doctor Dolittle, which I read again and again, along with its numerous sequels. This series of books did not turn me on to science in any direct sense, but Dr. Dolittle was a scientist, the world’s greatest naturalist, and a thinker of restless curiosity.

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