Ingenio, enseñanzas y anécdotas del Dr. Dawkins como docente en Oxford. ( )

The second part of Dawkins's memoirs, in which he writes about his professional life from about 1970, when he returned to Oxford, up to the time of his seventieth birthday party in 2011. He chooses to do this in a non-chronological way, grouping the experiences he wants to tell us about under a series of big headings - publishing, television, teaching, conferences, etc. In between times he drops famous names ("I met my future third wife at Douglas Adams's fortieth birthday party..."), slips in a couple of accounts of research projects he was involved in, and some afterthoughts about the ideas in his other books. Fascinating, intelligent and very readable, as you would expect, but it somehow comes over just a teensy bit self-satisfied. Although, if you've had a career like his, there isn't really all that much to be modest about, is there? ( )

This is the second of Dawkins memoirs to come out since his retirement as an active professor at Oxford University, this book is more about the science that was the focus of his career than his previous life history. He still does a little name dropping, but it's more in sync with professional moments in his career (a final interview with Christopher Hitchens or debates with antagonistic American evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould). He discusses the science that was the foundation behind each of his books, and, of course, still manages to fire a few shots across the bow of Creationism. What I found most interesting is that one of the Microsoft billionaires, Charles Simonyi, endowed a professorship at Oxford for a specific purpose Dawkins was to fill. This started a series of lectures featuring some of the world's leading scientists and philosophers of science. Dawkins discusses this guest speakers of each of these lectures in detail.

Dawkins concludes the book with a poem of his own devising, giving some hope that he's not yet done writing about science. I do hope he still has some books left in him, as a leading Humanist, he is a large voice for the cause. ( )

Oxford Professor of Biology Richard Dawkins is probably more infamous as a leading spokesperson for atheism (“The God Delusion ” was a bestseller for many weeks in 2006) than he is famous for his distinguished contributions in biology, which includes the seminal “The Selfish Gene ”. As a science popularizer, he has also had best-sellers with “The Extended Phenotype ”, “The Blind Watchmaker ”, “Climbing Mount Improbable ”, and “River Out of Eden ”, each of which elucidates and/or extends the mechanisms of evolution. “Brief Candle in the Dark” is a kind of continuation of the autobiography that began with his 2013 book, “An Appetite for Wonder ”. The title is an homage to Carl Sagan’s “The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark ”, which is, in my opinion, the most powerful manifesto of science.
“An Appetite for Wonder” describes Dawkins’ formative years, the first eight of which were in colonial Kenya, and his introduction to the Oxford tutorial system, under which he blossomed as an intellectual, and where he published “The Selfish Gene”. “Brief Candle in the Dark” is a collection of reminiscences about the personal side of this international science celebrity. Dawkins enjoys the limelight and revels in a good argument. With “The Selfish Gene”, he moved the locus of natural selection from the organism to its molecules, and with “The Extended Phenotype”, he showed how the process of evolution can be manifested beyond the cell, beyond the organism, beyond the collective, and even into the physical world. “River Out of Eden7” is a beautiful little extended essay that looks back along the highway of evolution that links both our species and each of us as an individual to our genetic origins, through our mitochondrial DNA.
Each of these Dawkins books has generated its own wake of criticism, sometimes from his peers, sometimes from creationists, sometimes from religious believers. “Brief Candle in the Dark” is Dawkins’ personal, virtually conversational, account of each of those controversies and how he has dealt with them. His personal life is intertwined with an extraordinary cast of personalities, including both Nobel-winning scientists like Francis Crick, Niko Tinbergen, and Richard Leaky, and intellectuals such as Carl Sagan, David Attenborough, Douglas Adams, Peter Medawar, Jared Diamond, and Christopher Hitchins. A remarkable collection of photographs is included. ( )