Unweaving the Rainbow

  • Richard Dawkins
Penguin: 1998. 313pp. £20, $26

This volume falls, somewhat prematurely we may hope, into the Grand Old Man genre. Richard Dawkins lards his enthusiastic tribute to the wonders of science with quirky asides and personal anecdotes. These anecdotes assume the reader's affection for him, always a risky assumption before reaching admired and advanced old age. His conversational style allows him to be brusque and testy about others' achievements and expect to carry the reader with him.

The argument of the book is unobjectionable: that understanding the processes revealed by scientific analysis makes things more wonderful, not less. Emphasizing the Wonders of Science has been a staple of scientific popularization for the past 200 years. Science makes strange the familiar and thus opens our eyes to the intricacy and the extent of the world within which we bumble along from day to day. Dawkins makes a further turn on this argument to distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ wonder. He attacks credulity and its manifestations “in superstition, the paranormal, and astrology”.

John Tyndall undertook a similar epistemological joust, more amusingly described; invited to attend a seance 100 years ago, and fresh from his Royal Institution demonstrations, he competed with his spiritualist hosts: “The wonderful narratives resumed; but I had narratives of my own quite as wonderful. These spirits, indeed, seemed clumsy creations, compared with those with which my own work had made me familiar. I therefore began to match the wonders related to me with other wonders. A lady present discoursed on spiritual atmospheres, which she could see as beautiful colours when she closed her eyes. I professed myself able to see similar colours, and, more than that, to be able to see the interior of my own eyes. The medium spoke of the performances of the spirits on musical instruments. I said that such a performance was gross, in comparison with a kind of music that had been discovered some time previously by a scientific man. Standing at a distance of twenty feet from a jet of gas, he could command the flame to emit a melodious note⃛. These were acknowledged to be as great marvels as any of those of spiritdom. The spirits were then consulted, and I was pronounced to be a first-class medium.”

Tyndall recognizes with wry humour how readily scientific assertion can be absorbed back into contrary beliefs. Dawkins takes that argument in a different direction. He enlarges his attack on credulity to include what he sees as falsely ethical readings of evolution in the work of Stephen Jay Gould and in followers of James Lovelock. He offers, as an alternative, clear and approving accounts of the work of scientists such as Horace Barlow and Richard Gregory, who have paid special attention to vision and its determinants.

The book is at its best in those chapters and passages where Dawkins can delight in exposition; he writes effectively on genes and their histories, and on the brain and its modelling powers. Sometimes, however, the chapters seem to be patched together from paragraphs and aperçus laid end to end without a defining thread of argument. Dawkins seems at times uncertain of the audience he is addressing (we are assumed to be knowing enough to share his prejudices against quite sophisticated critical theorists and yet to need educating about coincidences). Sometimes he denounces metaphor, and sometimes breezily adopts it. He has clearly been stung by the critiques of his own metaphoric habits in The Selfish Gene with its shift of levels from activity to ethics, for he alludes more than once to the need to read the whole book and not be misled by its title.

Unweaving the Rainbow is at its worst in the often impatient and cavalier treatment of evidence from intellectual fields outside science. This ranges from a demeaning reference to John Ruskin, and a simplistic aside concerning the cultural anthropologists Margaret Mead and Derek Freeman, to a condescending habit of wresting a line from a poem to serve his purpose, as if it had no further complexity or context. So, a fine quotation from the astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar is pitted against “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty” as sounding “much more sincere”.

Dawkins accuses his avowedly favourite poets, Keats and Yeats, of typifying an ignorant repudiation of science. If only Keats had turned to Sir Isaac Newton for inspiration, if only Yeats had accorded more value to reason, how much better their poetry would be! The title of his study draws on Keats's poem “Lamia”, which is concerned with the peculiarly equivocal appearances of things. Lamia is a woman but she is also a destructive serpent; in both incarnations, however, she is very beautiful. As a serpent she is:

A gordian shape of dazzling hue,

Vermilion-spotted, golden, green and blue,

Striped like a zebra, freckled like a pard,

Eyed like a peacock, and all crimson barr'd

Lamia: woman or serpent? The fruits of scientific enquiry may not always be pleasing to the eye. Credit: BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY

Which is her true nature? Is she, as she claims, an innocent woman bewitched, or is she a guileful serpent disguised? The old sophist Apollonius blasts her with his philosophic gaze and she resolves into a serpent, but she is no longer the beauty of before, now she withers away.

The vigour of Keats's language thrives on precise detail. The poem struggles, with poignant sophistication, to interpret the cost of pursuing knowledge. It works to disabuse the reader from any idealized fancy that beauty will always be rediscovered at the end of enquiry. Keats had begun training as a medical student and understood these issues without sentimentality.

Dawkins wants it both ways. He wants to function as Apollonius, disabusing his reader of the various magical-seeming possibilities of astrology, coincidence, relativism and misleading metaphor. But he also wants to assert the inevitably wonder-enhancing power of scientific insight; he does not want to destroy the beauty of Lamia. He is dismayed by the poet's question:

Do not all charms fly

At the mere touch of cold philosophy?

There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:

We know her woof, her texture; she is given

In the dull catalogue of common things

In “Lamia” the question is loaded with the dismay of the poet struggling to locate truth. “Lamia” is no ignorant rejection of natural philosophy's reductionism; it is a painful and sinewy debate, more tough-minded than the softened prose in which Dawkins ends Unweaving the Rainbow : “A Keats and a Newton, listening to each other, might hear the galaxies sing”. Or, as Keats recognized, the galaxies may not be singing.