Unweaving the Rainbow
by Richard Dawkins
Houghton Mifflin Co.

"In a previous book," says famed science writer Richard Dawkins in "Unweaving the Rainbow," "I gave away the number of the combination lock on my bicycle. I felt safe in doing so because obviously my books would never be read by the kind of person who would steal a bicycle."

Reading this peculiar assertion, I had to pause for a minute to decide whether he was joking. Given the tone of the statement, and the attitude he adopts throughout the book, I decided he probably wasn't. The high-minded folks who care enough about the Truth to buy his books would be incapable of such a low act as bicycle theft (assuming they could figure out which one was his), for science is the highest form of knowledge and those who care about science are consequently a superior brand of human being.

The book's title comes from a Newton-bashing poem by Keats, and the book itself is a defense of the "Poetry of Science" against those ignorant louts – poets, post-modern academics, certain segments of the public – who find Darwinism (or Dawkins' particular brand of Darwinism, anyway) existentially depressing. He chides poets for moaning that Newton’s optics took the fun out of rainbows. They should understand that an explainable universe is more beautiful than a mysterious one.

Just think, he says, what greater verses Keats and Wordsworth might have written had they been "properly tutored" in Newtonian mechanics and Darwinian theory. Wouldn't their talents have been better spent glorifying the ideas of Maxwell and Feynman? It sounds as if Dawkins himself may have missed the point of poetry, and of what differentiates science itself from mere ideology. Didn't communist dictators suggest that their poets would best serve their countries by glorifying the writings of Marx and Mao?

When he comes to exposition of current theories, Dawkins’ writing feels more at home. There is a useful description of how DNA fingerprinting works, and a section on the way brains construct a virtual reality from the signals of the eyes both of which live up to his claim of being "awe-inspiring." But his choice of topics in general seems curiously uninformed. He spends an entire chapter bashing astrology, for example, and rants that horoscopes lead their readers to see people as types instead of individuals. (Does he really think that the people who read his books both don’t steal bicycles and read their horoscope religiously?)

He also spends an entire chapter explaining where rainbows come from (something most of us heard in high school or earlier), and another explaining basic probability. Dawkins sets out to wow his readers with the wonder of science but winds up dragging them over excruciatingly familiar territory.

— Katherine Nagel (knagel@phy.ucsf.edu)