The late Derek Ratcliffe, arguably Britain’s greatest naturalist since Charles Darwin, once explained how he cultivated a technique for finding golden plovers’ nests. As he walked across the featureless moor, ‘the gaze’, he wrote, had to be ‘concentrated as far ahead as possible, not in one place, but scanning continuously over a wide arc from one side to the other and back’. Should you look down at your feet, or allow yourself to be distracted for a second, chances were that this elusive wader would slip off its eggs and you would never work out whenceit came.
Reading Richard Dawkins strikes me as requiring a similar kind of disciplined attention. Look up from his book at the weather outside, or drift off briefly in some internal reflection, and you invariably find that you have lost your place on the page and the thread of his argument.
It is not because Dawkins is difficult, although often the biological concepts he likes to explore are both challenging and complex. It is primarily because he strives at all times for formidable clarity. Often you are made aware of an almost mathematical precision to his syntax. He seems to be aiming for the simplest, shortest way to capture exactly what he intends to say and wishes you to grasp.
Small wonder that he was the first holder of the Simonyi Professorship Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. Or that he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature as well as the Royal Society. He is a gifted stylist, but one in the manner of his own hero, Darwin. In their respective works, the writing is always subordinate to the mission of clear communication. Yet, for Dawkins, that transparency entails supreme economy — hence the reader’s challenge in the matter of undivided attention.
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