Dawkins’ appetite for wonder shows no signs of waning

When you are in a room with Richard Dawkins the last thing you expect him to do is to start reciting prayers. He begins with this one: “Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord/And by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night. Amen.

OK, I’m being a little facetious. The 72-year-old British scientist isn’t exactly praying. From his home in Oxford, he’s recalling back to me a prayer he used to recite every night at public school when he was a young boy. After some time, he says, its meaning evolved towards ranting-nonsensical-blabber. An interesting case in meme theory, Dawkins explains.

As I’ve previously outlined in this newspaper, Dawkins coined the word meme back in 1976, when he wrote his debut book The Selfish Gene. He argues that cultural transmission is analogous to genetic transmission. Throughout history, language has been the key catalyst by which we carry these transmissions in the soup of human culture.

But back to Dawkins and prayers for a moment. Because the young Dawkins, and other children who were reciting the prayers understood the language they were repeating, the words had a ‘normalising effect’. This is similar to the proofreading of DNA; and it’s what makes it possible for memes to survive through generations. A simple experiment could be set up to test the criteria of meme theory, says Dawkins.

“It would be interesting to play a game of Chinese whispers to do this. If you were to whisper a message in a language that the children all understand, then I would expect the message to get through to the other end of the line intact. But if it was in a language that the children don’t understand, then they can only imitate what they hear. And so it will come out hopelessly garbled at the other end.

“If the phrase is said in the language that the children do understand, then there is a sort of normalising. The children repeat the words that they take out of their built-in dictionary. This prayer that we used to recite [back in my schooldays] was an intermediate case. We children didn’t really know what it meant, and so we were imitating it phonetically.”

Dawkins is speaking about his childhood and memes because they are two subjects that crop up several times in his memoir: An Appetite for Wonder.

The narrative begins in the early 1940s, when Kenya was still another outpost of the British Empire, and John Dawkins, Richard’s father, worked in the Colonial Service. It concludes in England during the late 1970s, when the evolutionary biologist published The Selfish Gene.

Dawkins admits to being mesmerised from a young age by various questions, like what relationship does our journey in life have with the ecosystem we are all part of? And how does billions of years of development — through the purposeless, mechanical process of evolution — affect our lives and shape posterity?

“It was probably at Oxford that I started seriously thinking about those questions,” he says. “But I think I was curious about them at the age of about eight or nine. I vaguely remember being inspired by the question of whether space or time has a bound, or if it goes on forever? And university — especially in biology — gave me the tools to think about this in greater detail.”

While scientific thinking took up most of Dawkins’ time in Oxford, he recalls a second passion that ran parallel to a world of solid evidence and experiments: Poetry. He quotes some of his favourite lines from Rupert Brooke, AE Housman, WB Yeats, and AC Swinburne in his memoir. It’s not the first time Dawkins has spoken about the art form.

In his book Unweaving The Rainbow, he wrote, “It is my thesis that the spirit of wonder which led Blake to Christian mysticism, Keats to Arcadian Myth, and Yeats to Fenians and Fairies, is the very same spirit that moves great scientists.

“I think the world and the universe in which we find ourselves is surely a subject of great poetry,” says Dawkins, who is sitting up in his chair now with enthusiasm.

“The fact of our existence as conscious beings, who have eyes to look up at the stars, ears to hear birdsong, and brains to understand and comprehend, is really astonishing.” Extraordinary things on this planet have arisen as a result of 4bn years of a very slow process that we now understand.”

Those with a keen interest in science will perhaps find the latter half of this memoir to be the most engaging part. Dawkins writes eloquently about how he came up with his ideas for The Selfish Gene, which remains his most popular book.

The inspiration to start writing it arose partially from a failure by other biologists at the time to properly explain evolutionary theory. In the late 1970s many documentaries tried to relate Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection to ask questions about topical political issues, like altruism versus selfishness, and collective versus individual welfare. There was one problem: The answers they produced were flat-out wrong.

The major error, Dawkins posits, was a version of the theory being put forward called evolutionary panglossism: This makes the mistake of thinking that natural selection applies to species, and not to individuals. Another misconception that this theory is guilty of is presuming that species conserve their environment, or limit their population, for future generations.

This idea is tempting to believe, especially for humans, says Dawkins; since we are blessed with foresight and can judge which actions are likely to benefit our species. It’s an interesting concept to measure how advanced our brains have become over millions of years. “Natural selection cannot favour long-term gain, but we with our brains can foresee certain courses of action.

“Although they might temporarily seem positive, in the long run they are negative. We frequently look into the future of mankind and see dangers. That is something that brains can do. It may be one of the reasons that brains evolved in the first place: To look into the future.”

Dawkins’ concluding comments might help explain an activity nearly all human beings spend so much of their life involved in: Making plans for the future, rather than living in the present moment. “We with our brains can foresee that if we let natural selection take its course then it could be disastrous in the long run. And we can prevent that by going against the purely biological imperative that natural selection might suggest. We are constantly looking into the future, simulating what might happen if we take various courses of action.”

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