The good doctor is angry. Angry with pseudoscientists, new-age Wiccans, old-age romantics, and all the illiterate relativists. The good doctor is also brightly hopeful.
The good doctor is, of course, Richard Dawkins, erstwhile evolutionary biologist and author of The Selfish Gene. In Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion, and the Appetite for Wonder, Dawkins sets out to defend the science - its method, its history, and its critical intellectual soul - from attackers on all fronts. The title is derived from John Keats, who once railed - inspired by a night of drinking with pals Charles Lamb and William Wordsworth - that science had destroyed poetry by "unweaving the rainbow" and reducing it to its prismatic colors. Not so, argues Dawkins. The rainbow is the product of millions of individual prisms, which create millions of rainbows, which we experience as we move in space. Rather than a continuum, we're seeing distinct, individual rainbows, or partial rainbows. Add to this the fact that sometimes a film inside the drops of water can create interference and alternative prismatic effects, and suddenly the rainbow becomes something far more complex - and ultimately more poetic.
The spirit of his argument is not only that the complexity of the natural world as divulged by science is good and poetical, but it is precisely so because it is true - a sentiment he ironically shares with Keats. Another target of Dawkins's wrath is the increasingly ubiquitous popular-science media that purveys dumbed-down pseudoscience. For several years, Dawkins has steered the rigorous (if élite) course and maintained that science shouldn't be gussied up.
The pursuit of truth brings Dawkins to the ever hyped world of digital technology. Besides deriding postmodernists for their inability to write cogently (a problem the good doctor has never suffered from), Dawkins takes on outlandish theories about a decontextualized digital society and the heady relativity of virtual worlds. Computers, like the human brain they imitate, are irrevocably anchored in causality. Truth isn't relative in hyperspace. Each text (to borrow from the postmodernists) can be traced to its sociobiological roots. Of course, tracing such things, Dawkins writes almost gleefully, is exponentially more complex than Newton's unweaving of the rainbow - a prospect that can make even a scientist a little poetic.
Unweaving the Rainbow, by Richard Dawkins: $26. Houghton Mifflin: +1 (212) 420 5800.
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