Thisappeared on my doorstep today, many moons after my pre-order, so it was a surprise.
Now, I’m feeling really disgruntled with Dawkins personally, after he was such a colossal asshat to Rebecca Watson. But, so far I’m incredibly impressed with this book, and I think it fills a void in the skeptical publishing world, being a well-written and professionally produced book for kids. There’s been some stuff from Prometheus books, but the pickings are slim and the quality is variable at best.
My 8yo has wondered a couple times who the first people were - she knows that she has parents, who have parents, who have parents, etc. and wondered where that went if you followed it all the way back. She was delighted to see Chapter 2 titled, “Who was the First Person?” I liked how Dawkins framed the question first with three origin myths from Tasmania, Israel (yes, THAT one, :)), and Scandinavia.
He does a marvelous job so far of explaining human origins and evolution. My kid was appropriately shocked, weirded out, and skeptical that her 185 millionXgreat grandparents were scary-looking fish!
That’s as far as we got, but I can’t wait to see what comes next. Just getting a non-believer’s telling of Adam & Eve, along with a comparison to another weird myth that has different versions, was worth the price of the book, in my opinion.
I saw this book come up on Amazon the other day, and I was mildly intrigued. But I wondered: is this a book by Richard Dawkins The Scientist or by Richard Dawkins The Atheist? In other words, is the book about Science, or about Science vs. Religion (or something else entirely)?
Thanks for posting this! My kids are inundated from all sides with religious stuff (from friends at school, from their grandparents, etc.) and I’m always on the lookout for stuff to expand their skeptical little world views.
Care to share? I admire both of them and do not know what transpired.
Note to self: must carry gum with me at all times, in case I ever get into an elevator with Dawkins.
I read that article, but I didn’t see any mention of what actually happened in the elevator, just Dawkins and Watson’s take on it.
As for the book, I just ordered it, thanks for pointing it out!
Thanks! I guess I heard about it when it happened, but it didn’t impress me at the time as a big deal.
ETA: But don’t tell Ms Watson I said that. 
I realize this is a highjack, sorry, but: I understand it to have been a bit of a rift in the broader (net-aware) atheist community. Dawkins had the worse of the argument, I think, in what amounted to rank and blatant dismissal; but Watson herself wasn’t blameless. All in all a pretty disappointing affair. (But the real take-away for me was that even an otherwise modern-minded community has its share of utterly creepy jerks, most of whom, I am sad to admit, represent my sex.)
All that said … what would people say is the lower bound on the age-appropriateness of the book? Is this something my sister could read to her moderately precocious five-year-old?
Getting propositioned is misogyny? Is having sex misogyny?
In both cases, it all depends on how you do it.
I think Watson’s point, a not unreasonable one, is that it’s far more polite to proposition someone when they can walk away from you. They can’t do that in a sealed, moving elevator. Moreover, it can be offensive and off-putting to be propositioned by a near-stranger.
Honestly, I think PZ Myers had the right of it. I’ll try to dig up links, but his basic view was that Ms. Watson’s comments were fairly mild and boiled down to “Guys, this is creepy. Don’t do it.” And appropriate response from Dawkins et al would have been more a chagrined “Okay, fair point,” than the vehement “not so!” that ensued.
Or, alternatively, this.
Some happy day, I shall learn the knack of brevity. Some day.
If you’re doing it right it sure is.
In a nutshell:
In a videogiving a generally positive review of her time at an atheist conference, Watson noted that the very day she gave a talk about how women at atheist meetings often feel objectified and constantly hit on, a guy followed her into an elevator at 4:00 a.m. and asked if she wanted to go back to his room for coffee. She looked a bit pained in the video and said, “Guys, don’t do that.” Then she moved on.
The internet blew up. Dawkins weighed in by saying basically, “If you’re not in danger of having your clit cut off, stfu about women’s issues!”
Paranoid Randroid, I think this is probably a bit beyond a 5yo. I think my 8yo (who is pretty sharp) is just now achieving the attention span and abstract thought required to follow it. But that doesn’t mean a parent can’t show it to the 5yo and summarize some stuff. That’s what we did with a sex-ed book (billed as a “7 and up” book) when Chloe was 4, and it worked great. There are a lot of fun and engaging graphics.