Hypotenuse's Full Review: Richard Dawkins - Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, ...
Richard Dawkins is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. Endowed in 1995 by Charles Simonyi of Microsoft, Dawkins is the first appointee to this chair. In my opinion it would be hard to find anyone more suitable for the position. The understanding possessed by the author, and his delightful way of expressing this awareness, is truly an experience to be enjoyed to the fullest extent.
Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder is Richard Dawkins' answer to those who argue that the understanding of science detracts from the mystical beauty found in the unknown.
"The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that makes life worth living, and it does so, if anything more effectively, if it convinces us that the time we have for living it is finite."
Richard Dawkins begins to unweave the rainbow with a look at the enormity of time. What is so awe inspiring about time? Time is a number on a digital clock, or a concern when we are late for an appointment and stopped at a red light. Time can be an irritant because of its increasing lack of availability. This author will show you the poetry to be found in understanding time.
Measuring history in his own unique way, Dawkins suggests we write the history of a year on one sheet of paper. Get enough papers, bind them, and you have a book. Now stack them up, starting with the present year on the bottom. Measuring this stack against your body you would find the time of Agamemnon, Ozymandias (one of my personal favorites) and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon at about halfway up your shin. A little higher up would be the time of Gilgamesh.
Drift backward in time to the discovery of fire. In order to find the volume containing this piece of history you would have to scale your stack of books to a level higher than the Statue of Liberty. In order to find a record of a trilobite in a shallow Cambrian sea you would need to climb up this literary collection for 35 miles or 56 kilometers. To give you some perspective Mt. Everest is less than 7 km above sea level. Now think about how long it took to form that Cambrian sea.
Did your brain just explode? Mine normally does at about this point. We've caught a glimpse of what geologists refer to as deep time, one place amoung many where you may find the poetry of science.
The author goes on to rail against what he considers the hijacking of science, letting loose his considerable wit. An outraged Richard Dawkins is a sight to behold. From his viewpoint, to compare astronomy to astrology would be "Like using Beethoven for commercial jingles."
"How can people find this meaningless pap appealing, especially in the face of the real universe as revealed by astronomy? On a moonless night when 'the stars look very cold about the sky', and only the clouds to be seen are the glowing smudges of the Milky Way, go out to a place far from street light pollution, lie on the grass and gaze up at the sky."
Pointing out the methods of these pseudo scientists, as well as the populist dumbing down of education, and the hostility from some academics, Dawkins is not hesitant to speak his mind. Utilizing such phrases as the 'Populist whoring that defiles the wonder of science', the author strings his arrow and lets fly, targeting those balloons of pomposity. I absolutely adore Dawkins' sarcastic humor.
Many poets have romanticized this anti-science stance. Coleridge, Yeats, Keats, and Lamb were all horrified by Newton's unweaving of the rainbow. His experiments with light and prisms were instrumental in our understanding of light and color. These seekers of beauty employed their talent with words to express their displeasure at a scientific understanding of what they had considered mystical. The author finds his poetry in the comprehension.
Dawkins compares an appreciation of science to the awe inspired by music. Comprehensive knowledge concerning the technical aspects of each instrument is not essential in order to enjoy the magic of Bach.
"Such a feat of unweaving and reweaving, or analysis and synthesis, is almost beyond belief, but we all do it effortlessly and without thinking."
Introducing the idea of bad poetic science, Dawkins tasks Stephen J. Gould for lumping catastrophists in with macromutationists and modern punctuationists, just because all three can be represented as non-gradualist. The author refers to this idea as very bad scientific poetry, stating:
"Mass extinctions are not a part of the Darwinian process except in so far as they clear the decks for new Darwinian beginnings"
And that:
" Natural selection involves deaths and mass extinction involves death, but any further resemblance between the two is purely poetic."
Another theme of bad poetic science that Dawkins addresses is the tendency to personify Nature, especially the concept of Gaia, which the author feels is very misleading. Personally, I feel that many make the same mistake with Dawkins' concept of 'the selfish gene'. He spends a good amount of time on this idea, all of which is fascinating.
"... the point that I am making is that genes, for all that they are the separate units naturally selected in the Darwinian process, are highly cooperative. Selection favours or disfavours single genes for their capacity to survive in their environment, the most important part of that environment is the genetic climate furnished by other genes."
Pointing out the sterility of many hybrids as a sign of non-cooperating genes, Dawkins sorts out the misconceptions inherent in the personification of the 'selfish gene'.
"Cheetah genes cooperate with cheetah genes but not with camel genes, and vice versa. This is not because cheetah genes, even in the most poetic sense, see any virtue in the preservation of the cheetah species. They are not working to save the cheetah from extinction like some molecular World Wildlife Fund. They are simply surviving in their environment, and their environment largely consists of other genes from the cheetah gene pool."
A series of essays on the wonder of science, richly rewarding in their diversity of thought, Richard Dawkins' Unweaving the Rainbow is in itself an awe-inspiring work from cover to cover. The preface details his personal thoughts on writing this series of essays, the bibliography a diverse catalogue of ideas from many areas - science through poetry.
I fully recommend any work by Richard Dawkins. He is one of my favorite authors. Anyone who can use 'verisimilitude' in a sentence without sounding awkward certainly gets my vote. Plus I must confess that I like him because he publicly and courageously admits to not quite understanding quantum physics. Which, of course, would never detract from the wonder invoked by such explorations.
Other books by the author:
River Out of Eden
The Extended Phenotype
The Blind Watchmaker
Climbing Mount Improbable
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