Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(43)
4 star:		(29)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(16)

 

 

Not many people have the gift of taking some common event and deconstructing it to the nth degree, while making it all seem quite normal. As in his other books (Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable, etc.) Mr. Dawkins makes your mind boggle at the way nature use very simple (?) building blocks to fashion something extraordinary ... like us. You are set back on your heels when you realise that your body is largely composed of modified bacteria, without which we could not exist. He goes on to expound on how we see and from there how our brain interprets the world, comparing it to Virtual Reality (no comparison!) - anyone who has experienced any form of VR will understand the immense computing power it takes to present even a half-decent rendition, but the brain does this continuously AND has time to dream, imagine, remember past events and places all in real-time - I doubt if enough teraflops of computer power exist in the world even now to do that.

The main thrust of the book is the poetry of science; how, by understanding more about the way the universe works, we can appreciate the wonder of it all the better - open our minds to something more beautiful than just the outward appearance of a beautiful object - even make us see the beauty in some not-so- pleasant sights!

In this book he uses well thought-out, easy-to-grasp concepts to explode myths, de-bunk charlatans, and de-mystify magic (a little TOO vitriolic at times, I fear!) - all with the intention of opening our minds to the concept of evolution (specifically Darwinism). He takes us from rainbows to barcodes to DNA in easy stages, explaining in graphic (but never tedious) detail just how nature can (and will) evolve all its wonders.

Sometimes I had to put the book on one side just to let the enormity of it all sink in. I still find it hard to grasp the vastness of time it required for nature to accomplish all that it has - yes, I can imagine a thousand years; a million? ... I'm struggling now; a billion? ... overload! But that's what you need to do to come to grips with the evolutionary process. I suspect it's this lack of comprehension / imagination that is behind the beliefs of many Creationists, or maybe a refusal to accept that evolution can happen without some 'intervention'. Having laid myself open to attack, I can only recommend that you read what Mr. Dawkins has to say and make up your own mind who has the right of it.

As a geology student I mainly use to read Dawkins' books out of curiosity for evolutionary biology and appreciation for his debating skills, not because they've got anything to do with my field. This one was different though, as I knew it would be about scientific thought in general, so possibly of more interest to anyone into science, no matter what their specific expertise.....
I have to say now, after reading it not once but twice, I am glad I have to disagree with nearly all the negative critics I read on this book, and there seem to have appeared lots, both on Amazon websites and on various magazines and journals. Which was, incidentally, one more reason for me to grow curious about this essay....

"Unweaving The Rainbow" is a collection of informal personal reflections on what science is all about, what it means to some of us from an emotional viewpoint, and how it fares when compared to other cultural orientations that seem to be more widespread, like arts and humanities, or (in stark contrast to science!) superstition, pseudo-science and metaphysical spiritualism. There's no technical discussion of any topics in the philosophy of science, just the knowledgeable digressions of someone with something to say. My only quibble is that the last four chapters seem to stray somewhat far out of the book's main purpose, delving deeper and more exclusively into the realm of "extended" biology, following an evolutionary thread that starts with Dawkins' typical metaphors on the role of genes in the game of life and ends with a touch of cultural anthropology and psychology.... But then again, it's just one more example of how science can be beautiful and fulfilling, though still lacking answers to some of our questions (but working on it, and you never know....) One might as well consider that the book's goal could have been just expressing the author's views on anything he wished, and there my quibble falls!

Somebody says that Dawkins takes on an extreme position, closure to anything that's not scientific, cultural intolerance and nasty undertones... Well, I haven't found any such attitude in here. In fact, I expected his firm, worked-up arguments against religion possibly to be one of the central themes, but I was wrong... His prose flows quiet and clear, humorous, never bitter to anyone. No hint of a temper, just reasoning, and wonder here and there, to remind us that he probably isn't just a scary Oxford professor, but also a human being (who'd suspect that??!!).
Sure, his words are spoken out clear, and they may sound arrogant and intolerantly confrontational when addressed at those who believe in magic, superstition, spiritualism of outlandish sorts, fake science, religious integralism, and the like. But it is my impression that such hard feelings aren't on the part of science, but of its opponents, especially when they notice their arguments can be easily dismissed when someone wants to take time and examine their claims, passing from careless, informal small-talk to "official" testing and debating (and subsequent disclosing of embarrassing truths!). Contrary to what some people believe, honest science DOESN'T harbour ANY superiority complex, as even its results are always prone to doubt and rejection under due evidence. Rather, it's nonsensical thinking that suffers from an inferiority complex. The harshness wasn't in Dawkins' words,probably just in some of his readers' hearts when they felt called out on faults in their ideas.

Other critics, mainly in Italy, lamented a closure to the value literary and figurative arts and to humanities in general, as if Dawkins had stated that science is the only worthy intellectual quest. Another one, on a famous magazine, commented on the author's supposedly misleading recourse only to those poetic quotations that could sound as casting doubt onto science, whereas he would ignore so many other artists who made no bones about their admiration for scientific achievements. Again, I can't find any single example of an antiliterary position anywhere here, no hint at "the two cultures", but rather an implicit enjoyment and even praise of poetry, music and such. And more logically, if I wanted to defend science from its detractors, or from those people who seem to misunderstand its ways and purpose, I would draw examples from them to better point out what I deem to be wrong specifically in their words, I certainly wouldn't mention just anyone else at random!

This is an interesting read that hopes to make you think a little more with your own mind and to let you notice that the world, life and the universe as we know them, anything around and about us, it's all wonderful and awe-inspiring also when you try to understand with a down-to-earth, sensible approach. There seems to be no clear evidence for fairies in the woods yet (thus far!), but we can enjoy hiking just the same, all those plants with their incredible chemical life-tricks, a menagerie of funny warblers with a song for everything they want to do, rocks with ancient though somewhat silent stories to tell, and a star high above that runs big part of the show just by casting its intangible light! Well, this is beautiful enough isn't it... And if there are fairies somewhere we'll certainly find out more about them. But only just IF!

Dawkins the old Master is at his best and worst in this book. The premise of the bookis arranged around the idea that Poetry and Art are sometimes in fundemental opposition to science. But why should they be Dawkins asks?

It is a fair question and one must make allowances for some bad scientific allegories as well as plain bad poetry. Dawkins has started out with a wonderful idea and he develops it very nicely for about half of the book. Then the book begins to degenerate into something of a jumbled criticism of Steven J. Gould (nothing new there) and the wanderings and adapted characteristics of hedge sparrows and --- no surprise --- a defence of the selfish-gene theory.

In final analysis Dawkins starts out with one of the those cosmic-wonder-of-science books, and then it degenerates into borderline pedantry, with interesting bits of science thrown in around the sides. Dawkins is not the populariser that is Carl Sagan and his writing in this book shows it.

Dawkins is at his best when he has a specific point to prove in an area that he knows well. "The Blind Watchmaker" and "The Extended Phenotype" and the "Selfish Gene" are all par excellance when it comes to him arguing from a first premise in his area of expertise.

Dawkins is also an old crusty Oxbridge lecturer and it comes across in this book. I like that a lot! I think that some readers may be a little bit perturbed to be told what to think. But let's get it straight here. This man has one of the greatest minds in Modern Zoology -- it behooves us to listen to him. We have a lot to learn from him. His tone is also old-fashioned and may strike people as slightly pedantic, but there is no substitute for clear teaching techniques: Dawkins does not assume we are all geniuses and I really like how when he uses a word that is not all that common he encloses a meaning for it inside parentheses. It reminds me of those good scientific primers from the 1960s that one used to read, you read them to learn something about the world and you expect to be told what to think.

Dawkins gives you the scientific, intellectual and vocabulary tools and he expects you to do the rest. He brooks no dummies. Some (American?) readers, raised with an insistence on "respect for other's opinions" -- however silly, may find Dawkins a little hard to stomach at times. We must remember that he comes from a long line of English intellectual thought; I see him as similar to Lord Whitehead, and Betrand Russel in that respect. Both were more than a little [ ] up on certain topics and both were extremely opinionated -- but they wrote well and the whole history of western thinking has benefited from the enormous ideas they espoused and the span of history and scientific thought that they have been exposed to --- Dawkins is from that same English intellectual stream, now frightfully close to being dried up.

In final analysis this is not the best of Dawkins' work. It does have very good vignettes of Science, from Newton's unweaving of the rainbow to those hedge sparrows, and it is obvious that Dawkins is also a connosieur of the romantics, particularly Keats and Shelly. That is also the mark of a well rounded human being, but the poetry and the science of this book could be better maintained, developed and connected.

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.

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.

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 (pecking at a special spot in the cage, for example) by rewarding it regularly with food. Then, the experiments went on to show that if the food is rewarded on a random basis, the birds accidentally pick up and focus on some random behavior that they incorrectly associate with getting food. In a word, they learn to be superstitious. In one particular example, Dawkins explains how a researcher "set up the apparatus to `reward' the pigeon from time to time no matter what the bird did. Now all that the bird actually needed to do was sit back and wait for the reward. But in fact, this is not what they did. Instead, in six out of eight cases, they built up - exactly as though they were learning a reward habit - what Skinner called `superstitious' behavior. ... One bird spun itself round like a top two or three turns anticlockwise between `rewards.' Another bird repeatedly thrust its head towards one particular upper corner of the box. A third bird showed "tossing" behavior, as if lifting an invisible curtain with its head." [see pages 163-164]. The point of all this is that animals (and not just birds) have a tendency to make false associations of causality, and this is largely our basis for belief in many things, including the supernatural. It's something to think about next time you find yourself hesitating about stepping on a crack, walking under a ladder, accepting a room on the 13'th floor, or watching someone getting "healed" by the laying on of hands.

Dawkins argues that scientists should learn to be a little more poetic, but that trying to teach science with poetry can cause problems. In particular, he takes Stephen Jay Gould to task for using what he calls "bad poetry" in which the scientific meaning gets lost, or seriously distorted. Personally, I enjoy poetry, but think it has no place in scientific explanations - and I agree that when it gets carried away, the ambiguous and metaphorical nature of poetry can cause some real hang ups when trying to understand scientific principles. It's been a complaint of mine, before, that I don't think scientist should describe fundamental particles as "dancing," "kissing," etc., though some do.

Dawkins also includes some interesting stuff on the genetic view of survival in which the "environment" is the sea of other genes - both cooperative types and enemies - that from it's immediate environment. This part of the book provides some really interesting insights and an interesting point of view for evolution.

The book has a good index, and is very well written. Dawkins is an excellent writer, but just the same, I think a few illustrations would have added to this book (there are none). Still, this is an excellent book. I highly recommend it for anyone with a general interest in science

Richard Dawkins reminds me of the protagonist in Plato's Cave analogy: one of those rare individuals who staggers out of the stygian depths of human ignorance and catches a brief but blinding glimpse of the way things actually are. However, on his joyous return to the cave to tell people about the marvel and wonder of what he has just witnessed, he is attacked and killed for ruining our blissfull stupidity. In other words, Dawkins is attempting to spread his (and science's) message about the external reality that we reside in, but the masses just don't want to hear it. They want their "spirituality" and "mysticism", whatever those things are supposed mean (looked 'em up in the dictionary and all i got were a few vague, circular, and ultimately meaningless definitions-not that i was surprised, however). Dawkins thinks that as long as people have an open mind and a decent ability to comprehend english, they will see the beauty of what he is saying-that the universe is bigger, better, more beautiful, amazing, awe-inspiring, and just completely more mind-blowing than anything that any religion or cult purported it to be. Judging from the many of the reviews, this is simply not the case. They would rather have their tiny, impotent god, their narrow-minded ideology that is responsible for much of the hatred and bigotry that we find lurking around us. People do not want to be told that they are just another animal, on just another planet, orbiting just another star, found in just another galaxy, which in turn, is perhaps in just another universe. We shout out against this clear voice of reason that we are the center of the universe, because our collective ego knows no bounds. We are not just animals we say desparately, trying to convince ourselves more than anyone else. Poor Mr. Dawkins; his intelligence, wit, clarity, and excellent prose style is wasted on these philistines, these "christians" and other self-righteous types, who would like nothing more than to see Mr. Dawkins "sin" of thinking rationally and not assuming that we, that hateful, murdering, genocidal portion of the animal kingdom that calls itself humanity, are the reason for the existence of everything, although our existence is necessary for nothing. Give us back our purpose, we shout at Mr. Dawkins, so that we won't have to realize how empty and shallow our lives actually are. Do not tell us that we are not immortal, we howl, so that we won't realize how much of our lives have been wasted in the pointless rat-race of capitalist America, home of the free and land of the depraved. We retort "your science cannot explain art, music, or literature", ignoring the fact that our god cannot even explain our existence-the same god who told us that the earth is flat and slavery is a-ok, as long as you give money to the church. However, Mr.Dawkins is not afraid of us, the great anti-intellectual american beast, and that is what makes us hate him even more.

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.

Dawkin's Unweaving the Rainbow is a skillfully crafted book; his idea of the beauty of nature is romantic - in every sense of the word; and his knowledge of not only biology, physics and chemistry, but also litterature and philosophy is truly amazing.

However, past the middle, towards the end, Unweaving the Rainbow looses some of it's power, before doing a great comeback with the chapter The Balloon of the Mind.

One thing, I - as both an atheist and a person dedicated to religious freedom - found compelling (especially when comparing Unweaving the Rainbow to other writings by Dawkins) is the avoidance of the bashing of religion. Sure, Dawkins makes comments on what he perceives as the ignorance of religion; but overall, the book is one of his best works - except, perhaps, what I would consider his magnus opus: The Ancestors Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution.

Anyone who has worked with children in the context of science understands their capacity for wonder. I volunteer for a bird observatory, and children who visit are permitted to release banded songbirds. If you watch those children's faces when the bird flies off, you understand very well that we are borne with an innate sense of wonder.

But somewhere along the way that sense of wonder at the physical universe gets re-directed; Prof. Dawkins might say that our sense of wonder is mis-used. We invest that sense of wonder in superstition, silly science, pseudo-science and worse. Is it because, as Keats argued, by unweaving the rainbow Sir Issac Newton destroyed our sense of wonder at a rainbow? Does science's analysis destroy romance and wonder?

Dawkins argues otherwise, drawing from examples ranging from Newtonian physics to Darwinian evolution to cell biology that, rather than destroying our sense of and capacity for wonder, each development in science creates new wonders. Which is more marvelous: a sky filled with mythological beasts, outlined in stars, or black holes, white holes, white dwarfs and the exotica that actually make up our sky? A scientific truth, argues Dawkins, can be and is the most wondrous thing of all.

Whether it is the age of our planet, the composition of our cells, or the information-processing capacity of our brains, Dawkins argues forcefully that we don't need superstion to be in the presence of something wonderful, or even mysterious. The universe is explicable.

Along the way Dawkins quotes Keats and others, takes on the quasi-scientific and mystical, and debunks a great many easy targets. He acknowledges, if indirectly, that carried to its logical extreme his argument is against religion as well. Anyone who has read any of Dawkins' other books will hardly be surprised.

While Dawkins is a good science populizer, this might be his most accessible book. Dawkins is not dogmatic, but he ferociously intelligent and highly analytical. In this book, more than others, he reveals a fondness for romance. Provided, of course, it never creeps into science.

Very highly recommended.