Books
Triumph of the weird
by David Larsen
Can we all learn how to breed scientists?
In retrospect, Curious Minds was never going to turn me into Einstein’s Dad. But that’s parenting for you. You see a book with the logo “How a Child Becomes a Scientist” splashed on its cover, and your mind instantly translates it into: “How Your Child Can Win the Nobel Prize”.
You don’t quite acknowledge this to yourself, however. You just think, hmm, a book of essays by high-powered scientists, looking at the links between their early lives and their choice of scientific careers. How interesting.
So it’s all the more painful when one of those scientists calmly kicks your covert aspirations in the teeth. “We were weird, no question about it,” writes developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik of herself and her siblings, who grew up idolising Galileo, trick-or-treating dressed as abstract expressionist paintings, and arguing Chomskian linguistics at the dinner table. “But the truly extraordinary, really weird thing about our upbringing was my parents’ gift for making this weirdness seem absolutely natural and normal – the accepted, ordinary, happy way that civilised people went about their lives. They were devoted to their children’s intellectual lives all right, but their devotion was utterly unlike the twenty-first-century, upwardly mobile, middle-class parental obsession with ‘enrichment’ and ‘achievement’ … For me, intellectual life wasn’t something you achieved, it was something you breathed.”
Gopnik is mildly insufferable, but her essay is still a treat: a vision of family life as an ecstatic dream of fulfilled idealism, like Little Women without the Civil War, the unrequited love or the dead sister. And yet, she writes, “My siblings and I weren’t prodigies by nature. We were ordinary children who had rich oppportunities to learn and who were taken seriously by people who cared about us … I was lucky, but children – and science – shouldn’t have to rely on luck.”
In other words, get off your behinds, teachers and parents, and give the kids in your charge rich (but non-middle-class-obsessive) opportunities to learn.
So if we want to nurture enquiring young minds, we should adopt a focus on intellectual life as process, rather than educational success as product? Massive potential for neurotic parents to miss the point here – “Am I process-oriented enough yet? Will my kids fail because I’m too fixated on success?” – but still. It does sound good. And the other essays in the book go some way to supporting Gopnik’s implied exhortation. Many of the 27 contributors grew up in immigrant North American families, with a high intellectual culture taken for granted.
Scientists are not, of course, required to be more self-aware than the general population. Some of these essays are dull, some pompous, some read like pleasant fantasy. (Richard Dawkins admits that he can’t recall whether his early reading of Doctor Dolittle really inspired him to investigate the natural world, and then spends the rest of his essay discussing why it ought to have done.)
The book offers a plethora of lovely moments, intriguing ideas and pleasing one-liners. (Sociobiologist Robert M Sapolsky wins the Unlikely Opening Gambit award with, “How did I wind up as a scientist? By all logic, I should start with Gilligan’s Island …”) But if you read it as an exploration of human development – how do people wind up the way they do? – then the two most interesting essays are Gopnik’s and Steven Pinker’s. Gopnik tells you by far the most inviting story about the kind of childhood that might plausibly foster intellectual growth. Pinker, inconveniently, tells you to treat all such stories as self-serving mythology.
“Don’t believe a word of what you read in this essay on the childhood influences that led me to become a scientist,” he writes. “Don’t believe a word of what you read in the other essays, either.” Having spent his career investigating the workings of the mind, Pinker makes a detailed and convincing argument for distrusting both human memory and the unconscious motivations that shape our personal narratives. It suits us to locate our lives’ wellsprings in our childhoods, he suggests, but we’d do better to look somewhere far less sexy: the intersection of our genes with random minutiae. “Rather than childhood experiences causing us to be who we are, who we are causes our childhood experiences.”
This doesn’t negate the case for adopting Gopnik’s attitude to childhood and family life, and it doesn’t make the rest of this book any less fascinating. What it does do is encourage you to take nothing on faith, to ask intelligent questions, and to assume that everything is open to debate. To think, in fact, like a scientist.
CURIOUS MINDS, edited by John Brockman (Vintage, $29.95).
