Brief Candle in the Dark
Finished — 2025-11-23
I think I have successfully separated Dawkins the person (the shambling gene vehicle), out in the world, at conferences and on social media and in academia gossip; from Dawkins the intellectual character he portrays in his own books. That writer-Dawkins was my introduction to “grown up” nonfiction reading, and what an introduction it was. I have enshrined the memory of staying up late, sitting on the Portland hotel bathroom floor in order to continue reading Climbing Mount Improbable without waking my traveling companions.
This second memoir portrays Dawkins the playful and energetic intellectual collaborator; the close friend of Douglas Adams; the inexhaustible scientific mind who can’t help including a long digression on the nest-digging behaviors of certain wasp species in his memoir; the old-school, Colonial Service, landed-gentry naturalist who recites specially prepared comic verse at Oxford dinners celebrating his accomplishments.
I admit to wishing to be more like that Dawkins. Given the choice, I would have liked to have that culture-soaked, science-writing, “discover something true about the universe” sort of life.
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Some raw notes follow.
Fields of science from physics to evolution can be modeled as economics, agents “trying” to achieve some outcome
Peter Meadower as most influential science writer on him
I thought about Dawkins giving speeches at Oxford and receiving awards at academic events around the world and eating ploughman’s lunch on the grass with Jared Diamond
Claims Climbing Mount Improbable which was the first I read of his, starting my nonfiction reading career, as his most underrated, least read, and most innovative (bar The Extended Phenotype)
The whole Wodehouse parody in the religion chapter is a splendid specimen of English expression, of the heightened sort that I recently tried to capture in conversation with Jon about greater investment bringing greater reward when it comes to art
I would like my life to include more poetry than it does, in light of the verse found in here