Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder

by Richard Dawkins

Book Overview

Biologist, humanist, and bestselling author Richard Dawkins deeply examines the inherent beauty within modern scientific discoveries.
"If any recent writing about science is poetic, it is this" (The Wall Street Journal).
Did Newton unweave the rainbow by reducing it to its prismatic colors, as Keats contended? Did he, in other words, diminish beauty? Far from it, says acclaimed scientist Richard Dawkins; Newton's unweaving...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0618056734
• ISBN13: 9780618056736
• Release Date: April 2000
• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.6" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Anti-quackery manual

A highly readable and entertaining statement for science and good poetry and against quackery and superstition. Nonsense of all kinds is attacked; the religious variety, the esoteric, the leftist, the feminist... If you like a good polemic, this is a good place for it. The book should be required reading, but unfortunately the usual effect of such sermons is preaching to the choir. No serious afficionado of astrology will give up on the stars and their impact on us, no hyperfeminist will drop the idea that gravity and DNA are just artifacts of male chauvinism, no cultural relativist will accept stricter concepts of truth, no believer in transsubstantiation will accept the relevance of scientific reasoning, even if they could be co-erced to read this book. Reason does not appeal to un-reason. My favorite 'take away' from the book is the story of the superstitious pigeon in the pattern-less Skinner box.

Good Poetic Science

The starting point for this book is the belief many people seem to want to hold on to that understanding something scientifically somehow reduces its beauty and wonder. Dawkins shows how science can actually take us beyond our otherwise small and overly familiar everyday awareness and open up vast new areas of experience in which to delight. Discovering and understanding the electro-magnetic spectrum, soundwaves, DNA fingerprinting, for example, leads to more questions and greater imaginings as well as practical applications. Holding on to myths and self-delusions is explained in part by our stone-age minds, our appetite for wonder and our (necessary) credulity as children. The last third of the book I found most interesting as Dawkins writes more directly about evolution, genes and how the human brain may have come to expand. If language was the main factor in this expansion then he suggests that symbols and metaphors, ie 'poetry', have been a major factor in our intelligence. Maybe. What Dawkins definitely wants us to be aware of is bad poetry and bad poetic science. We now have so much of the world accessible to our understanding that our appetite for wonder can easily be fed by good science. Dawkins, as usual, is here feeding our appetites for wonder. He both presents scientific knowledge and encourages curiosity, imagination and the desire to learn more.

Poetical science

Richard Dawkins lifts the attraction of science by quoting the very personal expressions of well-known poets about the beauty of nature. But besides these poetic outburst, his work contains deeper digging essays. On the evolutionary front, he characterizes magisterially the core propositions in the theory of the late S.J. Gould. He gives new explanations on the selfishness of the genes, while showing that co-evolution, co-adaptation and altruism are only useful servants in the spreading of those genes. He also tries to explain the dimensional explosion of the human brain. On the negative front, he castigates Gaia as nonsense and torpedoes in a few paragraphs the work of Margaret Mead. Richard Dawkins is also a brilliant master in the unmasking of paragnostic or religious (Fatima) tricks. He mocks the overboiling feminist frustrations, where one ultra sees Newton's 'Principia' as a 'Manual for Rape' (really!). But he becomes profoundly desperate when he encounters barbaric scientific ignorance in the British Establishment, where this 'gift' is even considered as funny. This very rich book contains still more interesting items (like the use of DNA analysis in trials). It is, like all Richard Dawkins' works, thought-provoking and a must read.

Truth is stranger (and more beautiful) than fiction

For thousands of years, rainbows were beautiful, mysterious things, often associated with the supernatural, and universally looked upon with awe. Then along came Newton, who, with a small chunk of glass, discovered that it's possible to make an artificial rainbow. His experiments showed that what we call white light is really a mixture of all the colors of the rainbow, and that raindrops, suspended in the air, act like tiny prisms. It isn't magic. It isn't supernatural. Poets have repined over Newton's discovery, feeling that something was lost by his unweaving the rainbow and giving a scientific explanation for something that was, for so long, a thing of mystical beauty. Dawkins, though, takes issue with this point of view. His thesis is that understanding the universe does not destroy its beauty and wonder, nor should it dampen our artistic appreciation. One of the arguments he makes is that science has been too timid in just accepting, without argument, the poet's complaint. To make his point, Dawkins shows how almost unimaginable knowledge has come to us as a result of understanding light - which began with Newton unweaving the rainbow - and how the universe is infinitely more incredible now, than it was when we saw stars as simple points of light in the night sky. In the process, Dawkins provides some interesting insights into a wide array of physical phenomena. He describes how we see color, in the first place. This is fascinating reading. Then he explains how the ultimate unweaving of light - understanding it at the roots of its quantum nature - has led to understanding the chemical makeup of stars that are billions of light years away. Furthermore, the nature of this ancient light tells us how space is changing - expanding - and how this knowledge helps us understand the origins of the universe itself, and ultimately it's future fate. So, when Newton told us how rainbows work, he did not make them any less beautiful. Instead, he opened up broad vistas of insight that led to unimaginable new knowledge about a universe that is vastly more complicated, rich, and wonderful than the simplistic views it displaced. While encouraging appreciation for the truly wonderful and amazing things in nature, Dawkins is quick to point out that "we have an appetite for wonder, a poetic appetite, which real science ought to be feeding but which is being hijacked, often for monetary gain, by purveyors of superstition, the paranormal and astrology." He devotes a fair amount of this book to discussions about these superstitions, how they are inconsistent with logic and scientific facts, and how they actually demean the truly amazing universe in which we live.One of the most interesting chapters describes how animals are actually predisposed by evolutionary pressure to make false statistical associations. Dawkins describes experiments that show this effect in birds. The basic approach of these experiments is to teach the animal some behavior