Unweaving The Rainbow. - Review - book review

By Richard Dawkins

PENGUIN [pound]8.99

Richard Dawkins has had praise heaped upon him for the clarity and descriptive quality of his writings. Like the painter who deftly transports us into his make-believe vision, Dawkins has used the power of words to sway the uninitiated into the ticker-tape world of the genetic code, which clothes itself with the attributes of the living cell in order to reproduce itself at the expense of all others. According to neo-Darwinist Dawkins, the innate aspiration of the 'selfish gene' to leave more of itself behind is the driving force behind evolution. The potential new species strides ahead up the fitness curve, leaving its more poorly-adapted predecessors languishing behind, to the point when they are driven to extinction. That is the world as Dawkins sees it.

Dawkins' complaint in this book is that studious anti-science ignorance as well as a wishy-washy desire to believe in superstition and magic have not only become fashionable, but that these attitudes bereave us of the beauty and poetry that lie in the scientific unravelling of the secrets and mysteries of the cosmos. But perhaps, he should look to his own vision and interpretation of the cosmos, which, far from captivating and inspiring, leaves many feeling bereft and void.

His title, Unweaving the Rainbow, is taken from Keats's celebrated poem in which he claimed that Newton and his ilk destroyed for ever the poetry of the glistening hues of the rainbow. 'In the dull catalogue of common things, Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings... Unweave a rainbow', says the poet. But that is just where Keats and the anti-science sceptics of today are wrong, says Dawkins. In quoting from the genius physicist, Richard Feynman, 'The beauty that is there for you is also available for me, too. But I can see a deeper beauty that isn't so readily available to others.' Dawkins makes the point that scientific discovery contains its own powerful poetry, which provides a far more satisfactory explanation than the misguided, or even fraudulent explanation that we swallow in the purposefully deceiving manipulations of the magician and conjuror.

I agree with Dawkins that a fulsome explanation of phenomena, however difficult to comprehend, confers satisfaction, without necessarily detracting from natural beauty. Rainbows, despite knowing about raindrops, wavelengths and refraction, are still beautiful to behold. Yet, despite all we know concerning the physiology and psychology of sight, we remain blindly ignorant of the essence of vision -- the actual seeing.

Equally, the mystery of life remains -- perhaps it will always elude us, being the emergent property of a coherence of structure and form that we can never hope to emulate. Indeed, there is next to nothing of poetry in the technological manipulations that led to Dolly, the cloned sheep, and I suspect that it is precisely that sort of science that Keats would have hated and despised. Whether Dawkins likes it or not, there is still a place for the poet who sees scientific explanation as inadequate and an obfuscation of an ultimate mystery that recedes beyond time and the 'big bang'. But then, Dawkins is dismissive of religions and worship. They have no scientific backing.

Ironically, where you might have thought Dawkins would have found poetry in a scientific idea, he is disdainful and dismissive. Somehow, Jim Lovelock's Gaia thesis, instead of inspiring Dawkins with its stimulating logic, sticks in his throat to the point where he resorts to patent dishonesty to put it down. He states that Lovelock 'proposed... that bacteria produce methane gas because of the valuable role it plays in regulating the chemistry of the earth's atmosphere... The problem with this,' Dawkins enunciates, 'is that individual bacteria are asked to be nicer than natural selection can explain.'

What a banal falsification of the tenets that underlie Gaia. The essence of Gala is that neither one nor the other is behaving for the good of the planet. Rather, they do what they do because the total system of which they are part won't let them do otherwise. Lovelock's is not a fuddy-duddy concept, but a proposition that our planet is as we find it because of an underlying geo-physiology. Whereas a neo-Darwinist would see life as adapting to external conditions in the struggle for survival, the Gaian scientist sees external conditions being modified by life to suit life. And there's nothing mysterious in that: it is none other than an emergent property of the web of life itself. Moreover it can be mathematically circumscribed.

In many ways, Dawkins has become a victim of his own metaphors, having to uphold an idea of the selfish gene that resonates badly against what we know of life on Earth. How does such a selfish concept square against our discovery of the complex community structure of a microbial mat, such as those which grace the shoreline of Shark's Bay in Australia, and even more surprisingly appear to make up the fossilised structures found in three-billion-year old stromalite rocks? All of which appear to have comprised an evolving whole. And how can such a concept explain the discovery that trees in forests are linked together through a subterranean mat of root fungi, so that the nutrition and survival of one helps that of another?

But for all its reductionism, Unweaving the Rainbow, makes a good read. Dawkins does have the power to enthrall us and open our minds to ways of seeing, as well, if you are alert, to take issue. There is some beauty in that, though not poetry. Why do words move us, or music, or the bounding of a cheetah, or the form of an orchid? Surely not because we glory in syntax, or pythagorean harmonies, or the sliding movement of actin and myosin, or because the orchid is fooling a bee?

Again it takes a great scientist to point out the obvious. 'When romantic love transports me,' says Lovelock, 'I get no comfort from the knowledge that my passion is consequent upon the circulation in my blood of a simple steroid, testosterone... The pleasures of science are in the mind, but poetry and music move our hearts as well.' Isn't that what Keats was getting at?

COPYRIGHT 2000 MIT Press Journals
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group