Page 52 - The Peorian Vol 3 Issue 1 Winter

An Appetite for Wonder
The Making of a Scientist
A Memoir
Richard Dawkins
As someone who is well
familiar with the works of Dr.
Dawkins, this memoir made me
realize that most Peorians – nay,
most Americans – who may be
familiar with the genteel doctor
may only know of him for his
Atheistic stance. After all, that’s
what gets ratings and readers
these days.
But he’s so much more than
“just” a free thinker.
Dawkins is an emeritus fellow
of New College, Oxford. For
over 40 years he has been at the
forefront of ethol-
ogy – the study of
animal behavior – as
well as evolution-
ary biology (the two
kind of go hand in
hand).
If a scientist can
burst onto the pub-
lic scene, Dawkins
did when he pub-
lished his first book,
“The Selfish Gene”.
The book became
an instant (and
ongoing) best seller
thanks in part to
Dawkins’s approach
to genetically based
evolution, a position
that has become
universally ac-
cepted.
He also intro-
duced a word
that has also been
universally accepted
as well. But first,
cricket research.
In the late ‘60s,
along with his re-
search in ethology,
Dawkins found himself taken
with computers. More specifical-
ly, with computer programming.
Over the years, Dawkins became
addicted to creating programs
and languages, which he would
use in aid of his ethology experi-
ments.
One of those experiments
involved the mating songs of
crickets (long story, don’t ask) in
1973. Dawkins created a com-
puter language (STRIDUL-8) that
made his PDP-8 computer “sing”
like a cricket. He used these
computer-generated courtship
songs in his tests.
But then tragedy struck. Or,
more accurately, power outages
struck. A power cut was insti-
tuted throughout England due to
a nationwide coal miner strike.
Since his work required
electricity, he decided to set his
cricket research aside to start
writing a book he had been noo-
dling with since his days deliver-
ing undergraduate lectures.
He wrote the first chapter of
“The Selfish Gene” and then
promptly set it aside. Why? The
industrial unrest had subsided
and the lights were back on, so
back to his crickets.
Of course by 1976, his cricket
research concluded, Dawkins
would complete “The Selfish
Gene”, which introduced the
world to the concept of a meme:
The new (primordial) soup
is the soup of human
culture. We need a name
for the new replicator, a
noun which conveys the
idea of a unit of cultural
transmission, or a unit
of imitation. ‘Mimeme’
comes from a suitable
Greek root, but I want
a monosyllable that
sounds a bit like ‘gene’.
I hope my classicist
friends will forgive me if
I abbreviate mimeme to
meme…
Examples of memes
are tunes, ideas, catch-
phrases, clothes fash-
ions, ways of making
pots or of building
arches. Just as genes
propagate themselves in
the gene pool by leaping
from body to body via
sperm or eggs, so memes
propagate themselves in
the meme pool by leap-
ing from brain to brain,
via a process which, in
the broad sense, can be
called imitation.
52 thePeorian.com