January 10, 1999
Richard Dawkins attacks superstitions, fantasies and every kind of
pseudoscience.
By TIMOTHY FERRIS
[LINK] [INLINE]
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UNWEAVING THE RAINBOW
Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder.
By Richard Dawkins.
337 pp. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Company. $26.
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Suppose you're a famous scientist, blessed with a social
conscience and a gift for writing, who becomes sufficiently
dismayed by the persistence of superstition, pseudoscience and
general muddle-headedness among the masses that you're tempted to
write a book about it -- one that aims to shepherd people out of
the darkness and onto the sunlit path of empirical fact. Your
skills are sharp, your motives lofty. Should you do it?
Well, maybe, but don't expect much in the way of reward. You'll
probably flop with the very people you hope to enlighten, and
understandably so. Their exploiters thrill them with hair-raising
tales of alien abductions and how Sally learned from a midnight
dream that Uncle Barney was perishing in a house fire; you get to
tell them that such stories, which they love, are bunk. And that's
if they hear from you at all: while they are paging through The
National Enquirer and watching ''Strange Universe'' on television,
your book will be read mostly by college professors who already
agree with you. Nor can you expect much gratitude from them,
either.
You'll be lucky to escape being nailed by the likes of Richard
Lewontin, the eminent Harvard zoologist and professional scold.
Reviewing Carl Sagan's last book, ''The Demon-Haunted World,''
Lewontin asserted that popularizers of science are motivated by the
belief that ''the truth shall make you free,'' a conviction that,
in this context at least, Lewontin calls ''wrong.'' The biologist
Paul R. Gross and the mathematician Norman Levitt, whose book
''Higher Superstition'' sparked a continuing debate about
post-modernist critiques of science, were dismissed by Lewontin for
what he called their ''obtuse ignorance of the actual state of
science.'' Get the picture? Stick your neck out and you'll be next.
So the first thing to be said about Richard Dawkins's ''Unweaving
the Rainbow,'' which argues that scientific fact is both
intellectually and esthetically more pleasing than pseudoscientific
fantasy, is that he is to be congratulated for his courage in
attempting it. Does he avoid all the pitfalls that threaten those
who tilt at the windmills of antiscience? Well, no. Too often he
sounds like Prof. Eat Your Peas, and he can't resist preaching to
the choir. But he's a good enough writer to get away -- sometimes
-- with ignoring the old dictum that no good deed goes unpunished.
Dawkins, a zoologist, is the Professor of the Public Understanding
of Science at Oxford and the author of two of the most widely
influential studies of evolution ever written, ''The Selfish Gene''
and ''The Blind Watchmaker.'' As their titles imply, they argue
that evolution is a mechanical, nonteleological process. Organisms
pursue their own selfish interests, indifferent to any putative
greater good, which indeed they could not serve if they wished to,
since the process is blind. As Dawkins puts it in ''Unweaving the
Rainbow'': ''Natural selection is never aware of the long-term
future. It is not aware of anything. Improvements come about not
through foresight but by genes coming to outnumber their rivals in
gene pools. . . . There is no foresight.''
This conclusion seems to me to be virtually inescapable as a matter
of science -- although in theological terms one can always hold
that blind evolution forms part of a larger and ultimately
purposeful system -- but it still strikes many as disheartening.
Even some scientists can't stomach it; Stephen Jay Gould, for one,
has taken Dawkins to task for what he calls his ''evolutionary
fundamentalism.'' Dawkins, evidently a bit stung, asserts in his
new book that Gould writes ''bad poetry'' that ''in his hands is
all the more damaging because Gould is a graceful writer.'' But he
concedes that many readers have complained to him about what they
see as the ''cold, bleak'' tone of his previous books, their air
''of barren desolation, of promoting an arid and joyless message,''
their sense that life is ''empty and purposeless.'' In ''Unweaving
the Rainbow'' he is out to present a kinder, gentler side of his
worldview, from which perspective science, for all its rigor,
emerges as akin to art. ''It is my thesis,'' he writes, ''that the
spirit of wonder which led Blake to Christian mysticism, Keats to
Arcadian myth and Yeats to Fenians and fairies, is the very same
spirit that moves great scientists; a spirit which, if fed back to
poets in scientific guise, might inspire still greater poetry.''
Sadly, the spirit of wonder is kept waiting off stage during much
of the first two-thirds of the book, which falls victim to several
of the rhetorical excesses that can afflict an able scientist who
starts wagging his finger at the ignorant. Dawkins belabors the
obvious: ''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.'' (You don't need a psychic friend to discern that.) He
seems out of touch: ''It is certainly important that some people,
indeed some of our brightest and best, should learn to do science
as a practical subject. But couldn't we also teach science as
something to read and rejoice in, like learning how to listen to
music rather than slaving over five-finger exercises in order to
play it?'' (What does he think goes on in all those general science
courses called ''Physics for Poets'' and ''Rocks for Jocks''?)
He takes a curmudgeonly view of those who attempt to reach the
young by teaching them that science is ''fun'': ''If children are
lured into science, or any other worthwhile occupation, by the
promise of easy fun, what are they going to do when they finally
have to confront the reality? . . . 'Fun' sends the wrong signals
and might attract people to science for the wrong reasons.'' He
excoriates what he calls ''the kind of populist whoring that
defiles the wonder of science'' and sniffs at the preferences of
the unwashed: ''Many people who read daily horoscopes don't really
believe them. They state that they read them only as
'entertainment' (their taste in what constitutes entertaining
fiction is evidently different from mine).''
Fortunately, after a couple of hundred pages Dawkins stops berating
the benighted -- who are, after all, mostly poor and undereducated
and, therefore, frightened -- and settles down to what he does
best, which is to convey each scientific idea with an affection
that brings out its beauty and clarity and makes the reader feel
not only that he understands it but almost as if he had thought of
it himself.
Particularly successful are his foresighted musings on information
theory, an emerging approach to understanding the world that could
eventually transform the philosophical underpinnings of science,
though to date it remains shrouded in fog. Information itself,
often muddled in such discussions, is here succinctly defined as
''surprise value, measured as the inverse of expected probability''
-- which is an excellent way of explaining why, for instance, a
ream of yellowed fish-wrapping paper increases in information value
if it is found to contain, say, a lost Bach cantata. Invoking the
information content of genetic material, Dawkins writes: ''We are
digital archives of the African Pliocene, even of Devonian seas;
walking repositories of wisdom out of the old days. You could spend
a lifetime reading in this ancient library and die unsated by the
wonder of it.''
Even grumpy professors like me will find ''Unweaving the Rainbow''
worth reading, if only for passages like that. At such moments
Dawkins throws off the wet blanket and emerges as one of the most
incisive science writers alive.
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Timothy Ferris is the author, most recently, of ''The Whole
Shebang: A State-of-the-Universe(s) Report.''
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
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