This’ll come as no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention over the last few years/blogs, but the responsibility for my decision to ditch work for four years and rack up some mighty debts can be laid at the door of uber-atheist Richard Dawkins. Actually, you could in turn blame Douglas Adams, whose posthumous Salmon of Doubt led me to The Blind Watchmaker, but then you’re well on the way some kind of infinite regression madness where I then thank the librarian that recommended the Hitchhiker’s trilogy to me, next the sadly unknown author who wrote a kiddies’ book about a friendly alien that gave me my love of science fiction, on to my primary school teacher who helped me learn to read and then my mum for giving birth to me and…what was the topic of this post again?
Ahem. So, I read The Blind Watchmaker, and it really did blow me away; not just the satisfying and subtle explanations for why life is like it is, but the realisation of just how badly I’d understood evolution before then - some sort of half-arsed idea of things wanting to evolve and a natural progression from amoeba to fish to reptile to the current pinnacle of life, homo sapians (and modern fish and suchlike just hadn’t evolved enough yet - “hang in there guys, you’ll make it”). I also realised either that I’d either a) had a GCSE science teacher who had failed to convey the utter brilliance of all this or b) spent too long in biology classes furtively studying the anatomy of the girl two seats in front and one to the left and completely missed the bit where Mr McBeard suddenly broke free of his obsession with setting fire to peanuts and wowed us with a history of life. At the time I was feeling unsure about any number of things - work, relationships, life in general - and it’s not too much of an overstatement to say that Dawkins’ book actually helped me through this period by supplying a little perspective; after all, when you view things on the 4 billion year scale, there’s not much worth worrying about, is there?
For the next few years I went absolutely bonkers for popular science - genetics, physics, geology, evolutionary psychology and, of course, more Dawkins. At the same time I derailed my career for fear of actually passing the exams and waking up one morning to find I was an accountant. I travelled and wondered what on earth to do next, and whilst I occassionally considered biology, I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to pull it off, maths not being my strongest point. But what way is that to live? Might as well pack it in now if you’re going to let a bit of self-doubt stop you doing anything, and eventually, my ears still ringing from the clout round the swede from my missus, I said “fuck it” and signed up.
So, why zoology? Because. And because. And because. Looking for links is actually slowing down the publication of this post, because I keep getting distracted by the content. I’m not even sure what job this degree will lead to - at the moment, I’m hoping to do conservation work. But right now, I just want to know as much as possible, and I have to thank Richard Dawkins for giving me that desire to learn. Unsurprisingly, the man himself can explain the appeal far better than me:
“There is a better reason for studying zoology than its possible ‘usefulness’, and the general likeableness of animals. This reason is that we animals are the most complicated and perfectly-designed pieces of machinery in the known universe. Put it like that, and it is hard to see why anyone studies anything else.” The Selfish Gene.
