EVERYONE A SCIENTIST
by John Gribbin
Review of Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins. Literary Review, Nov. 1998
BY A DELICIOUS irony, I was part-way through reading Richard Dawkins’s new book when the October issue of the Literary Review fell through my letter box. Dawkins’s title comes from Keats’s poem Lamia, written in 1819, in which the poet claimed that Newton had destroyed the beauty of the rainbow by explaining the origin of its colours. His mission in this book is to champion the opposite view: by adding scientific knowledge to aesthetics, we double our sense of wonder at the Universe. And there in the Review was a poem by Noel Petty (no Keats, he) wrong-headedly copying the idea that knowledge drives out beauty (he also copied the structure of his poem, and must be laughing all the way to the bank with his prize). Ah me. There, in a nutshell, is why Dawkins’s book is timely, needed, and particularly appropriate reading for any arts-educated person who regards scientists as rude mechanics.
This, of course, represents a change of direction for Dawkins, stimulated by his appointment in 1995 as the first Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford. His mission here is not just to speak up for science, but to reclaim some of the ground lost to pseudo-science, spoon-bending and the like. ‘Real science has a just entitlement to the tingle in the spine which, at a lower level, attracts the fans of Star Trek and Doctor Who and which, at the lowest level of all, has been lucratively hijacked by astrologers, clairvoyants and television psychics.’
Dawkins is excellent when describing the wonder of science, using, among others, the example of how the unweaving of the rainbow represented by stellar spectroscopy has made it possible for us to understand what stars are made of and how they work. Does this reduce our appreciation of stars? No. It enhances it, in the same way that the power and beauty of a steam locomotive are even more impressive and amazing when you understand how the mechanism works. Can there really be anybody who failed to feel a tingle up their spine the first time they learned that the atoms in their own body are literally made of stardust?
The prose of Unweaving the Rainbow is embellished (rather over-embellished, for my taste, but the reasons are obvious) with literary allusion and poetic quotations, as if to ask how many Professors of English Literature are as well informed about science as the average Professor of Zoology (Dawkins’s earlier incarnation) is about literature. His sideswipes at fashionable idiocies and the dumbing down of so much of education (degrees in media studies and the like), though, are delicious—as in the story of one of his colleagues, who confessed to an American devotee of postmodernism that she had found his book very difficult to understand. The postmodernist took it as a compliment.
Dawkins is at his best when he dons the mantle of the late Carl Sagan and roars into action against the hordes of pseudo-science, using simple statistics to explain away seemingly amazing coincidences as something to be expected, and using his knowledge of human origins and evolution to make it clear why our minds have evolved to perceive meaningful patterns where none exist. The chapter on ‘Unweaving the Uncanny’ is worth the price of the book on its own. I was also delighted to see that Dawkins shares my views on the greatest swindle of them all—the fact that insurance companies calculate the actuarial odds for the population as a whole, then tilt the balance in their own favour by declining to insure people who are at higher risk, or charging them a higher premium. It is comparable to bookies at a racecourse accepting bets on any of the horses, except the favourites.
But even Dawkins nods sometimes. He cannot resist the opportunity to bang the drum for his genuinely original and exciting ideas about selfish genes and co-operation, which for all their beauty do now seem very familiar from his earlier books. Perhaps the attacks on Stephen Jay Gould are also a little too shrill, although it is hard to be too critical here, since Gould certainly needs taking down a peg or two, in any case, these passages do make the point that, although Gould writes beautifully, beautiful prose can also be plain wrong. Dawkins (or his editor) could have clipped a chapter or two away and left a more tightly focused book, more clearly addressing the theme of its title.
This is important, because there is more to the book than the idea that science is built on a sense of wonder and an appreciation of beauty. Science is also of profound practical importance in modern society. Dawkins demonstrates this by using the example of how DNA fingerprinting has been misapplied, misunderstood and misinterpreted in recent years (sometimes wilfully misapplied: apparently, it is common practice among lawyers to reject prospective jurors who have scientific training, the reasoning being that such people will be more likely to see through the clouds of obfuscation typically associated with our adversarial legal process). He makes the telling point that ‘lawyers would be better lawyers, judges better judges, parliamentarians better parliamentarians and citizens better citizens if they knew more science and, more to the point, if they reasoned more like scientists.’ They could do no better than to start by reading this book.
