An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist by Richard Dawkins.

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.

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.

Setting Free the Bears: A Novel (Ballantine Reader’s Circle) by John Irving was published in 1968, not long after I learned to read. I think it was about the fifth or sixth adult level book I read (the first was this collection, the second and third were this one and this one, and I imagine all this added up to a certain amount of psychological … something). I never read juvenile fiction because the genre simply did not exist at that time. So, Setting Free the Bears: A Novel was in that set of books that I read because I need to read something other than Dr. Seuss, but that I probably read to early to really appreciate it. I bring it up today simply because it is cheap on Kindle. I look forward to reading it soon to see what I missed the first time around.

So Terrible a Storm by Curt Brown is cheap now. It is about the Thanksgiving Storm of 1905. We learned all about this storm this last summer when we visited the Split Rock lighthouse up north of Duluth on Lake Superior. This storm was a key event in the history of shipping and safety, much like the Titanic’s encounter with the iceberg changed shipping in the North Atlantic (no boat has been sunk by an ice berg since the US, Canada, and Norway deployed their iceberg response to that event).

I’ve never read The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis, but I’ll bet a lot of you either have and would like the two buck version of it for your growing but ever tiny library of eBooks, or would simply like to read it for the first time.

I myself am not big on corporate or industry leader biographies, though I suspect I would enjoy them. I just have too much other stuff to read right now. But if you enjoy such books, you will want to know that Intel Trinity,The: How Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove Built the World’s Most Important Company by Michael S. Malone is now 3 bucks.

Happy book collecting and reading!

Then, later, Dawkins got famous in another area, as a spokesperson for atheism. In fact, as a leader of the Atheist movement worldwide. A major milestone in that digression from biology was, of course, his book, The God Delusion. In The God Delusion, he told most people in the world that they were afflicted with a psychiatric disorder that caused them to believe in god. Atheists totally ate this up and for good reason. Also, Dawkins did the whole thing in his quaint British Accent and that took some of the edge off of it, and really, he did it well.

Then Elevatorgate happened, which had absolutely nothing to do with Richard Dawkins, but he chimed in. When he chimed in he said “Ladies, there is no way to get raped in an elevator. All you have to do is push the Stop and Door Open button and leave.” (or words to that effect).

Then just a few weeks later the person of all the people in the world who is closest to me was raped in an elevator.

The rape was interrupted not by her pressing the stop or open button, because they did not work. The rape was interrupted because she decided to kick the rapist’s ass. Then, he was the one pushing the buttons and when the door finally opened he ran. But it certainly did not have to turn out that way. He happened to be unarmed, for example.

Anyway, Richard Dawkins is a dick and that is not just because of his name. He’s a dick because he is utterly unaware of his white, male, British, academic, authory, etc. etc. privilege. Which would be OK, because who really cares, but privilege interferes with activism and being the guy who wrote The God Delusion makes you an activist. Privilege interferes with being a member of a diverse community (diverse as in other people don’t have the same privilege). You can only be an effective leader of a movement if you recognize your membership in the community, even if as a leader.

But you can stay in charge for longer than most, for longer than you deserve, if you corner the market you’ve developed for yourself. My friend and colleague Sarah Moglia overheard Dawkins say something one day that seemed to be an example of his cornering the market. He told someone in charge of major public event that if a particular person was allowed to speak at that event, Dawkins would not go. In other words, he used his huge and unchecked privilege to get another speaker tossed off the podium.

Why? Who did he get tossed? When did this happen? Why are we only hearing about it now?

It all comes down to Elevators, real and metaphorical. And shoes. Dawkins is actually pretty short.

Go read Sarah’s excellent post and find out what happened.

PS. I happen to know what Sarah is doing right now, as I’m writing this post. The image above is a clue so you can guess what that might be!

When Elevatorgate happened, the ensuing Universe Known as Rebeccapocalypse was shaped and determined by a number of early events that have caused the final result … well, not the “final” result, but the result that we are stuck with as of this writing … but had those first few days of Internet activity been a little different things might have come out a different way.

Here I would like to do two things.

One is to suggest that the horrid stinking gaggle of frothing winged monkeys that get their marching orders from Franc Hoggle and a few others have a point … actually two or three points. The other is to explore five issues (including these points) that came up in the early days of the Rebeccapocalyptic Universe and that could have become nice, interesting little galaxies of conversation but instead became stinking useless black holes orbited by the aforementioned frothing gaggling winged monkeys.

Before I take a step further into this mess I want to be very clear about something: This is in no way an effort to reach a hand across any sort of chasm or to build any sort of bridge, and in no way should any of the things I say in this regard be interpreted as either a) even an iota of respect for the Hoggle gang and what they stand for and/or step in and/or eat for their stinking trollish breakfast; or b) even a tiny withdraw of allegiance to my esteemed and wonderful colleagues in the blogosphere (you’all know who you are) who are almost always right when everyone else is almost always wrong. This is not a reconciliation. This is, rather, an exploration of missed opportunities to have some important conversations, opportunities that were ruined by the middle-school level sniping and backbiting that ensued early on. This is not an attempt to invite the winged monkeys to the conversation. They are not welcome. If you are a winged monkey reading this now, please go away.

The issues I’d like to bring up are a little complicated, and while there is overlap, they are also fairly distinct. For this reason I want to address each one in a separate blog post in what I hope is not a futile effort to keep the conversations that might ensue each on their own track.

First, I’ll touch on the question of power and relative power (on the Internet, mainly) vis-a-vis the question of whether or not Rebecca Watson should have commented about Stef McGraw‘s comments. I don’t want to speak about that event so much as the overall question of how differential levels of fame, infamy, or exposure shape our conversations. Then I want to talk about the question of spectra. Dawkins berated Rebecca for addressing something other than female genital mutilation. People have berated Ana Miller and me for addressing something other than Carnage on the Highways in our Fukushima Updates. And, most interesting, Rebecca got into trouble for actually addressing things like female genital mutilation while at the same time addressing lesser crimes against humanity while at the same time addressing annoyances. It is as though we expect the peas to get into the mashed potatoes and at the same time know that if they do the dinner is ruined!

Third, I want to talk about calibrating and recalibrating things. Years ago, on the Internet, I used the word “bitch” (in reference to myself … I was feeling bitchy about something). I was taken to task for using a sexist word. Now, we have men using the words “cunt” and “twat” to insult and threaten women, and screaming about how the use of these words makes them feminists. Calibration? Probably not. More relevant to the present discussion is calibration of sex positiveness. Should there have been a skeptical nude calendar? What if that was attempted in, say, 1880 to support getting the women’s vote? What if women went into the street today and burned their bras? Would only the EPA notice? This is a touchy subject because I will actually be suggesting that people change over time, in part because of experience and in part because society changes. I would hope the Skeptics Movement has at least some degree of fluidity and evolvability and that skeptics can recognize and understand this.

Another issue I’d like to touch on is the ways people tell other people to shut up. For example, there is the method whereby you sigh and go “Oh, I’ve had enough. So everyone else must shut up now,” or some version of that. Or one can issue a call to not feed the trolls. I’ll probably talk about a few different ways to tell people to shut up or to otherwise hijack the conversation, and tie up a few other loose ends as well. Like for example, if it really was Richard Dawkins who used the term “Muslima” to tell Rebecca Watson to shut up. Or was it the Zombie Richard Dawkins who said that?

I’ve suggested this before, and it may be worth repeating: Imagine that Rebecca Watson, Stef McGraw, Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, Barbara Drescher, Stephanie Zvan, All the Skepchicks, Me, all the other bloggers, and most of the commmenters on our blogs discussing Rebeccapocalypse all worked for the same big-giant company and this entire discussion happened at work. Imagine what the HR (Human Resources) department would be required to do, would want to do, would want to avoid. Imagine how they would handle the current discussion, and what they might do to avoid future difficulties like this from arising, by following best practices and following the law to the greatest degree possible.

Imagine that.

And now … “Power and Presence on the Internet and Elsewhere”

For example:

Police are looking for a man they say sexually assaulted a woman in Manhattan about two weeks ago.
A surveillance photo of the suspect has been released.

Police say the attack took place around 6:30 p.m. on June 21 within the confines of the 28th precinct.

Investigators say the man followed a woman into a building, then into an elevator where he sexually assaulted her.

Police are hunting for a man wanted in connection with a sexual assault and a robbery in the Bronx.

Authorities say he followed a 42-year-old woman into an elevator in a building near Tinton Avenue and East 163rd Street on Sunday morning at about 8 a.m. He then forced her from the elevator and sexually assaulted her.

A sexual predator was on the loose in Harlem after attacking a 12-year-old girl in an elevator, law enforcement sources said.
The suspect set on the victim at an apartment building in Central Harlem on June 21 at 6:25 p.m.

He allegedly followed her into an elevator and sexually assaulted her.

…Cops caught up with the teen after receiving a tip through the Crime Stoppers hotline. Sources say Pacheco had been picked out of a lineup by all four victims.

In the first incident Sunday, Pacheco allegedly dragged a 42-year-old woman out of an elevator of a building on Tinton Ave. and sexually assaulted her, cops said….

…”As soon as I heard about what happened [with the recent attacks], I immediately had my husband meet me at subways when I got home after dark any night,” said Wells-Hasan. “I have completely stopped going to the park by myself or after dark.”

Wells-Hasan said she is most unnerved by the attacks that have happened in elevators, buildings, and the streets.

…In the Trenton case, the girl was molested in a corridor, while in Napanee a group of children was followed onto an elevator, police said. He assaulted the girl and fled when the elevator doors opened….

…But this was not my first newspaper job, so I wasn’t surprised when a high-ranking male editor groped me in the elevator one day; the same thing had happened at my previous newspaper, with an editor I’d never even met before stepping into the elevator….

Let’s be clear. Sexual assaults and other bad things happen on elevators. Dawkins is wrong, and his assertion is not one of fact, but rather, of backpedaling. He can’t possibly think that a) a woman can just decide to walk away from a sexual assault or b) that if a woman is in fact made to feel uncomfortable in a given situation that she should keep quiet about it, and if she does not, that she should be told to shut up about it.

Most of the voices telling Rebecca Watson to quiet down and get a grip on herself are coming from, I think, men who just don’t want there to be a rule that says that they must modulate their behavior in connection to the idea that a very large number of women are sexually assaulted in their lifetime, and that the vast majority of sexual assault comes from men, and that the world is full of Demonic Males. Some are coming from men or women who want to live in a world where it is just as plausable for a society to emerge where the women rape, kill and beat the men instead of the other way around. Which is fantasy. And a few are coming from young Third Wave feminists whose youth is still getting them the attention that gives them a certan fleeting power over their own social milieu or who have not yet themselves been assaulted in a dark or out of the way place, or who are not close to someone who has been.

And Richard Dawkins.

For the record here are Richard’s comments in full. The first is in response to the kerfuffle over whether or not Rebecca Watson should have rejoined a comment that she did not have a valid complaint about having been asked to a man’s room while riding alone with him in a hotel elevator at 4AM after making it clear she was heading (alone) to her room for the night:

Dear Muslima

Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and . . . yawn . . . don’t tell me yet again, I know you aren’t allowed to drive a car, and you can’t leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you’ll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.

Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself Skep”chick”, and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee. I am not exaggerating. He really did. He invited her back to his room for coffee. Of course she said no, and of course he didn’t lay a finger on her, but even so . . .

And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about! For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.

Richard

And this is Richard’s response to a flurry of commentary complaining about his first comment:

Many people seem to think it obvious that my post was wrong and I should apologise. Very few people have bothered to explain exactly why. The nearest approach I have heard goes something like this.

I sarcastically compared Rebecca’s plight with that of women in Muslim countries or families dominated by Muslim men. Somebody made the worthwhile point (reiterated here by PZ) that it is no defence of something slightly bad to point to something worse. We should fight all bad things, the slightly bad as well as the very bad. Fair enough. But my point is that the ‘slightly bad thing’ suffered by Rebecca was not even slightly bad, it was zero bad. A man asked her back to his room for coffee. She said no. End of story.
But not everybody sees it as end of story. OK, let’s ask why not? The main reason seems to be that an elevator is a confined space from which there is no escape. This point has been made again and again in this thread, and the other one.

No escape? I am now really puzzled. Here’s how you escape from an elevator. You press any one of the buttons conveniently provided. The elevator will obligingly stop at a floor, the door will open and you will no longer be in a confined space but in a well-lit corridor in a crowded hotel in the centre of Dublin.

No, I obviously don’t get it. I will gladly apologise if somebody will calmly and politely, without using the word fuck in every sentence, explain to me what it is that I am not getting.

Richard

Emphasis fucking added. Oh, and now you have your explanation, Ricahrd.

See also:

• Rebecca Watson, Barbara Drescher and the Elevator Guy
• Shut up about everything all the time unless what you have to say is HITLER!!!!

Added, from Atheist Cartoons:

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http://www.atheistcartoons.com/?attachment_id=4509″>

But the talk was not old stuff. (See this important commentary by PZ Myers.) There was some important new stuff here as well. I had the sense that there was a fairly elaborate theory running below the surface and we were seeing bits and pieces of it, chosen for the audience and embedded in necessary contextual explanation which takes time to do. Thus, in an hours time, we got a taste which probably engorged the average intelligent audience member, but left the specialist chomping at the bit.

Dawkins made a number of points in his talk, and I’ll focus on what I see as the central thread. This thread addressed the concept of ‘purpose’ in relation to design, the differentiation of purpose into two types (archeo and neo, also potentially thought of as “natural” and “human-mad”), the potential complexity and (most importantly) adaptability of purpose-imbued systems, and the potential of subversion of this adaptability. This subversion is the crux of the talk, and it is unfortunate that this could not have been a two part talk where everything but subversion was covered in Part I, and the subversion question (which is really a major revision or extension of the memetic hypothesis, I think) in Part II.

As hinted above, subversion of adaptable purpose is, according to Dawkins, the expiation for the crazy stuff humans do, including things like skydiving and things like the rise of a Nazi state. Dawkins did not explore the ways in which this idea works (or not) differently at proximate (“how”) levels vs. ultimate (“why”) levels, but I’m sure he’d have some interesting things to say about it.

Purpose in relation to design was in part explicated by looking at both natural and artificial selection. He started with a very clear differentiation of where purpose can exist and not exist, where something like Ayers Rock, a lump of clay, or a rock may not really have a “purpose” while an adaptive function of a designed thing (like the culturally selected huge udder of a cow) may (to make a farmer rich). He used examples from both artificial selection and natural selection, as well as human engineering, and made clear the distinction between selection as a process (you’all know how that works) vs. intentional design or selection by humans. (But that distinction, while important, is not key to this thread, so we’ll leave that off).

Neo-purpose vs. archaeo-purpose (or maybe it’s “archeo-pupose”) are two terms that Dawkins introduced to differentiate between natural and human-engineered ‘purposeful’ things. Archaeo-purpose = adaptive functionality, maybe even non adaptive but naturalistic functionality, in nature. Neo-purpose is stuff humans make to do stuff, including artificial selection. The use of these terms in the talk seemed post-hoc and unnecessary, telling me that he’s got more to say about this but did not go into it at the time. (I mean, if you are going to design a couple of neologisms, they’ve got to have a purpose, right!?!??)

As an aside, with these terms we may have (primarily within the concept of archaeo-purpose) the possibility of a new way of talking about a definition of life. A living thing or feature of a living thing may have latent archaeo-purpose, but a non-living thing does not. However, abiotic action can have archaeo-purpose. Water (water just sitting there being observed) does not have “purpose.” But, the purpose of the falling of the water down a running stream or water fall can be described in thermodynamic terms, elemental bonding in partial physical or electromagnetic terms, etc. The purpose of the water is undefined or null, the purpose of the water fall is as a means of water answering the call of gravity. In nature, only life and verbs can have (archaeo) purpose. In a cultural context, anything can have (neo-) purpose. Like a rock. A rock in a sculpture garden can have the purpose of causing a visitor to the sculpture garden to wonder “what is the purpose of this rock…”

But I digresses…

A certain kind, category, subset, maybe level (not well described by Dawkins in the talk) of purpose can be complex and highly adaptive in how it plays out, like a guided missile which can adjust its trajectory to find its target, or a bat flying after an insect. The link between everything noted above about purpose and this complexity is accretetive. You’ve got to lay out the framework of purpose before you talk about the nature of purpose, but it is really the nature of purpose that we want to be talking about. If there is a link between the fundamentals of purpose and this property of complexity and/or adaptability, Dawkins did not explicate. But I suspect he is thinking about it.

Complex adaptive purpose (I’ll call it that for now, though I don’t really like the “complex” part … there can be adaptive purpose, and I can think of many examples can be and is often subverted. Dawkins gave some examples. This is particularly interesting to me, because I think a lot of important evolutoinary shifts have been exactly this, and indeed, almost all examples of co-evolution are just this, and everything is co-evolution.

But Dawkins point is simply that the brain is a complex adaptive system with a purpose that emerges from its developmental history, and if this developmental history is altered one way or another, you can get different syndromes of purpose. Thus Nazi’s, thus skydivers, thus people filing into a huge theatre to listen to some guy talk about purpose.

I have in mind a number of criticisms of the idea, but I can’t really be sure that they are valid criticisms because, as I suggest above, there are important parts of this idea that were not developed in the talk. thus, these critiques would be unfair and probably, even worse, misdirected. I would just be showing off my knowledge of things and possibly my vocabulary and writing abilities. Which is, of course, my primary adaptive methodology for obtaining food and sex. Which, at the moment, I have plenty of, so what would be the purpose of that!?!?!??

Before the talk, several of us got together at Annie’s Parlour. It was harmonic convergence, in a sense, of numerous independent groups all planning to go to Annie’s and ending up at the same table, including but not limited to Amanda and myself, PZ and his wife and daughter, Stephanie, Mike, Mr. and Mrs. Linux in Exile, Lynn, and a few others who don’t have links. After the talk, we spent close to an hour hanging around with Amanda and a teacher colleague of hers and his wife, Kristine and Mr. Kristine (Oh, and Kristine regaled us with her famous Jerry Falwell/Richard Dawkins/Galapagos story), and Lynn, conversing about the talk. Also attending in our group was my friend Lizzie and a couple of her buddies. All in all, it was a great social event that I wouldn’t have missed for the world!

Oh, and somewhere in there Richard Dawkins gave this talk, and I enjoyed it a great deal.

I have three bad reviews, one by this guy and two that came in to me after the talk via cell phone from academics who were in attendance. All those people are showing their own lack of grounding with these negative reviews, really. Dawkins came to give a talk to the public about certain ways to look at the complexity of evolutionary process and society. As an academic who actually studies this stuff, I could easily say that Dawkins talk was trite, same-old-stuff we’ve all been saying all along slightly re-wrapped, self evident, and so on and so forth. But I guarantee that Dawkins did not come all the way across the Great Pond to give talks in Michigan and Minnesota and elsewhere for the benefit of Ed Brayton, me, or any other PhD toting scholars. This talk was for the interested public, they’re the ones that packed about four thousand people into Northrup Auditorium, and they are the ones for whom this talk was crafted, and I think Dawkins did an excellent job.

PZ Myers gave a very well crafted and entertaining introduction, by the way. And here is his blog post on the event.

I’ll probably write up a bit more about Dawkins talk and a few further thoughts I have about it. But right now I’m off to bed. It’s a school night!!!!

Oh, and here’s Dawkins on our local public radio show this AM.