Does science destroy our sense of beauty and wonder? When Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Neil deGrasse Tyson or Brian Cox explain some phenomena of the universe, do they diminish your joy in beholding it? Do those who prefer mystery and are proud in their ignorance of science have a point? And what should we make of the efforts of those scientists who try to avoid conflict and make science cool, non-threatening, dumbed-down or aligned to whichever worldview is trending at the moment?

Unweaving the Rainbow tackles the issue of science and wonder. It is unrepentant in tackling ideas opposed to its theses but its overall message is a positive one – that we, scientists, public, artists and all, can do much better and benefit from the effort.

In December of 1817 a dinner was held at the London studio of the English painter and critic Benjamin Haydon. Among others in attendance were the poets John Keats and Charles Lamb. On display was Haydon’s painting Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem. In the painting, observing Christ and reacting accordingly are various historical and contemporary persons including Isaac Newton as a believer and Voltaire as a sceptic.

Lamb, drunk, upbraided Haydon for painting Newton, ‘a fellow who believed nothing unless it was as clear as the three sides of a triangle’. Newton, Keats agreed with Lamb, had destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to the prismatic colours. ‘It was impossible to resist him,’ said Haydon, ‘and we all drank “Newtons health, and confusion to mathematics”.’

Almost 180 years later, Charles Simonyi, a Hungarian-American software architect and billionaire who built the first versions of Microsoft Office, created an endowment for a new professorship at Oxford University. The Simonyi Professorship for the Public Understanding of Science aims to communicate science to the public. The first occupant of the professorship was Richard Dawkins who provided Simonyi with the framework for the program.

It is difficult to imagine a more worthy occupant for that chair. If the position had been made available some decades earlier, one might imagine Carl Sagan or Richard Feynman being desired candidates. But in 1995 it would have been difficult to look past Dawkins. Few others occupy the combination of being excellent communicators, carrying earned respect while also being challengers to flawed ideas.

Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene (1976) was an unexpected bestseller given that it was not intended for a public audience. Following its success, Dawkins seems to have accepted his career change to become a writer of books of popular science. The Extended Phenotype (1982), The Blind Watchmaker (1986) and Climbing Mount Improbable (1996) followed. But Unweaving the Rainbow (1998) was Dawkins’ first book since occupying the Simonyi Professorship.

The inspiration for Unweaving the Rainbow is to critically examine the broader accusation of Keats – that science, by explaining the natural world, destroys our sense of beauty and wonder for it. Dawkins has experienced some of this personally in the responses to some of his previous books. But as he says in the Preface to Unweaving the Rainbow; this is to be a positive response appealing to a sense of wonder that naysayers are overlooking.

That positivity might be difficult to see in the early chapters. Dawkins takes aim at targets you might expect if you are familiar with the issues around science’s public perception or at least familiar with Dawkins. Those targets include the hijacking of our sense of wonder by pseudo-science; populist dumbing-down; scientists and other academics succumbing to fashionable ideas; lack of critical thinking due to political-correctness; post-modernist objections to objectivity and truth.

At this point Dawkins risks sounding a bit mean. A bit like the fun-police. But he is inclusive in his tastes and is not dismissive of the talents of those he disagrees with such as Yeats, Keats and DH Lawrence. In fact, he readily admits to enjoying the art of those whose views on science he disagrees with. He comes down hard on the X-Files, obviously very popular at the time of writing, but contrasts it with the science fiction he argues is superior.

It is my thesis that the spirit of wonder which led Blake to Christian mysticism, Keat 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. In support, I adduce the less elevated genre of science fiction. Jules Verne, HG wells, Olaf Stapledon, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, Ray Bradbury and others have used prose-poetry to evoke the romance of scientific themes, in some cases explicitly linking them to the myths of antiquity. The best of science fiction seems to me an important literary form in its own right, snobbishly underrated by some scholars of literature. More than one reputable scientist has been introduced to what I am calling the spirit of wonder through an early fascination with science fiction.

Personally, I can also relate to his displeasure with those who try to make science appeal to children by trying (and failing) to make science seem fun, cool, relevant, non-threatening or to dumb it down. I distinctly recall my disappointment as an eleven-year old in science class. Having waited so long to have a special class devoted to the subject, what I had hoped for was for it to be taken seriously. And I was disappointed.

In the following chapters, Dawkins showcases for the reader all the wonder that has been gained from ‘unweaving’. He starts with how Newton’s unweaving led to Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetism to Einstein’s theory of special relativity. He shares the development of spectroscopy and its use to determine the composition of the stars; the discoveries of the doppler effect, red-shifted galaxies and an expanding universe. He describes how the eyes and ears are able to perceive light and sound. How Fourier Analysis can be used to untangle more than just sound waves but also show patterns in biological and astronomical phenomena. He covers the technicalities of the unweaving of DNA but also discusses the advantages and risks of how such information could be used.

Mixed light is sorted into its rainbow of component colours and everybody sees beauty. That is a first analysis. Closer detail reveals fine lines and a new elegance, the elegance of detection, of the bringing of order and understanding. Fraunhofer barcodes speak to us of the exact elemental nature of distant stars. A precisely measured pattern of stripes as a coded message from across the parsecs. There is a grace in the sheer economy of unweaving intimate details about the star which, one had thought, could be found only through the costly undertaking of a journey lasting 2,000 human lifetimes.

All this, argues Dawkins, should provide plenty of material for poets. Yet, it seems to fall to the rare individual such as a Carl Sagan to adequately express the wonders they contain.

For the next two chapters Dawkins returns to combat. This time towards modern superstitions and belief in the paranormal. Though he admits education may not be sufficient to defeat superstition, he discusses the implications of Arthur C Clarke’s Third Law and David Hume’s thoughts on miracles. Dawkins covers the various scientific techniques for obtaining and evaluating evidence such as statistical probability, double-blind studies, statistical significance, among others.

Clarke’s Third Law does not work in reverse. Given that ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’, it does not follow that ‘Any magical claim that anybody may make at any time is indistinguishable from a technological advance that will come in the future.’ Yes, there have been occasions when authoritative sceptics have come away with egg on their pontificating faces. But a far greater number of magical claims have been made and never vindicated. A few things that would surprise us today will come true in the future. But far more things that would surprise us today will not come true in the future. The trick is to sort out the minority from the rubbish – from claims that will forever remain in the realm of fiction and magic.

At this point the book takes a turn that some who may have prejudged it may not have anticipated. Dawkins says that a central tenet of this book is that science should leave room for poetry. But, he now warns, bad poetic science can lead us down the wrong path.

Dawkins shares instances where metaphor and symbols have aided scientific intuition to make genuine scientific insights. The problem is where poorly chosen metaphors create misunderstanding instead of deeper meaning. Worse is when deliberate misunderstanding or exploitation of concepts such as quantum uncertainty or chaos theory are used to make points that are best described not as scientific but as theological.

Examples of what Dawkins considers bad poetic science include Gaia theory, thinking of animals and nature as role models or viewing the world or universe as essentially caring and nurturing. A central tenet of Unweaving the Rainbow is that science should leave room for good poetry. Dawkins contrasts the bad poetic science idea of universal cooperation with what he argues is a good poetic science idea of genetic cooperation.

Within each of those separate gene pools, natural selection favours those genes that cooperate within their own gene pool, as we have seen. But it also favours those genes that are good at surviving alongside the consequences of the other gene pools in the rainforest – the trees, vines, monkeys, dung beetles, wood lice and soil bacteria. In the long run this may make the whole forest look like a single harmonious whole, with each unit pulling for the benefit of all, every tree and every soil might, even every predator in every parasite, playing its part in one big, happy family. Once again, this is a tempting way of looking at it. Once again, it is lazy – bad poetic science. A much truer vision, still poetic science but (it is the purpose of this chapter to persuade you) good poetic science, sees the forest as an anarchistic federation of selfish genes, each selected as being good at surviving within its own gene pool against the backdrop of the environment provided by all the others.

In the remaining chapters, Dawkins builds on this notion of good poetic science, combining it with his motive to show how unweaving illuminates the wonders of the universe. His topics in these chapters include viewing the gene pool as a ‘genetic book of the dead’ (the title of one of his latest books, published in 2023), what we have learned about how the mind works with analogies to virtual reality and theories to explain the rapid growth of the human brain in evolutionary time with similar analogies to the development of computer hardware and software.

The book is clearly well-considered. Dawkins has drawn examples from a variety of sources of science, art, popular culture, social trends and personal experience and also from other recent works of popular science. Reading the book first published in 1998, it is a little dated in some of its examples. Especially considering how much things have changed particularly with regards to technology and social media. That being said, it is to the credit of the ideas expounded in the book that many of the issues have only become more prevalent and relatable.

For example, I belong to a subset of parents who are of a certain age with children of a certain age where the contrast of the overprotectiveness of today’s parents compared to my own childhood experience is unavoidably extreme. The ramifications of this behaviour has been expressed by psychologists like Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff. So, when Dawkins says:

But, I am now conjecturing, our brains are calibrated by ancestral natural selection to expect a much more modest level of coincidence, calibrated under small village conditions. So we are impressed by coincidences because of a miscalibrated gasp threshold. Our subjective PETWHACs [Population of Events That Would Have seemed Coincidental] have been calibrated by natural selection in small villages, and, as is the case with so much of modern life, the calibration is now out of date. (A similar argument could be used to explain why we’re so hysterically risk-averse to hazards that are much publicised in the newspapers – perhaps anxious parents who imagine ravening paedophiles lurking behind every lamppost on their children’s walk from school are ‘miscalibrated’.)

It is not difficult to hypothesise how we have ended up at this particular destination. Take a phenomenon which leads people astray which Dawkins in 1998 explains using examples of searching through phone books and see how it plays out in a world with an ever-present internet, cell phones, social media and sensationalist news. I remember walking myself to school as did almost every other child in my school including some with physical disabilities. But my mother, who still lives on the same street, now reports that every morning and afternoon her street is jammed with cars of parents dropping and picking up their children.

If there is one thing that I believe connects Dawkins’ careers as a scientist, as a popular science writer and as a spokesperson for so-called ‘new atheism’ it is that he is a campaigner against lazy thinking. The human mind did not evolve to be an objective, rational assessor of reality. That is why it is difficult for the mind to appreciate realities such as a spherical Earth, an Earth that orbits the sun, much less the three-dimensional curvature of spacetime or wave-particle duality.

Our intuition not only fails us here, it tempts us with satisfying but false alternatives and weak metaphors. Some of these alternatives are over-simplifications, easy fixes, confirmation biases or self-serving solutions. They are not necessarily the result of ignorance, stupidity or prejudices but are often made by knowledgeable, intelligent, conscientious thinkers who perhaps made the error of leaping to an answer without properly considering the assumptions, the implications or the alternatives.

Is this war Dawkins’ has spent his life waging winnable? It is certainly an uphill one. Again, because reality is not intuitive, what knowledge has been gained has to be continually learned and relearned. Anyone with small children knows the astonishment and incredulity that arises naturally in them whenever an amazing fact is taught to them for the first time. Many of us perhaps share a nostalgia for childhood freedom and ignorance that leads them to prefer it over adult maturity and responsibility – a sentiment Dawkins also addresses in the book.

Yet, what also comes through in Dawkins’ writing is an eternal optimism. He is happy to recount instances where he has been incorrect, where his thinking has been led astray, only to be corrected by the confrontation with a new fact or explanation – and is glad to have had the experience. He openly examines whether some of the metaphors he has used constitute ‘bad poetic science’. That optimism pervades Unweaving the Rainbow. His convictions are that the pursuit of knowledge does not destroy beauty, that lazy thinking leads us astray and that a scientific worldview not only increases our wonder rather that diminishing it but also provides the added sting of verifiability to our emotional first impression. Whatever the reader might make of Dawkins’ personal tastes, the tone of his message, this is a lesson worth learning and relearning.