Unweaving the Rainbow

The title comes from a Keats poem and refers to Newton's resolving the colors of light through a prism, thereby diminishing the beauty and mystery of light and rainbows. At least Keats and others have contended this through their historic memes.
Dawkins disagrees and presents his reasons in a wonderful and instructive way. Dawkins thinks that an orderly universe, one indifferent to human preoccupations, in which everything has a explanation, forms a more beautiful, more wonderful place than a universe tricked out with ad hoc magic. I think after reading this book, most readers will agree. His thesis aims to show 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."
Dawkins goes through several basic science lessons explaining the fingerprints of light, sound and DNA, and provides a scale against the vast history of life and how humans just barely got in. If only my high school science books read like this!

I also enjoyed Dawkin's distant debate against his nemesis, Stephen Jay Gould, another favorite science writer of mine. Fans of World Wide ProWrestling or Tyson brawls can watch their splats, but I'd rather watch a debate between Dawkins and Gould. At least we can read about it from these two excellent science story tellers. And it goes to show the honorable competitiveness between two first-class scientists, and provides an actual example of how science works.
We read something innovative when Dawkins theorizes about reconstructing ancient environments through the study of DNA in a kind of 'collective unconscious.' For after all, life forms evolve to adapt to their surroundings, for example, the shape of the sparrow tells us something about the viscosity of air and its weather conditions.
Dawkins speculates on how our large brains evolved so quickly through a software and hardware co-evolution by a form of self-feeding. It may have occurred from language, hunting (tracking and maps for finding animals), ballistics (as in throwing spears), or from memes (metaphorical ideas). As he puts it: "The genes build the hardware. The memes are the software." I felt delighted that Dawkins revisited the powerful idea of "memes" which he gave birth to in his first major book, The Selfish Gene.
Several years ago, I made a bet with a skeptical friend that the word "meme" would appear in a dictionary within ten years. Although I have not checked every dictionary, I happily report that meme appears in at least one dictionary, the Random House Webster's College Dictionary, 1997, defining the word as: "a cultural item that is transmitted by repetition in a manner analogous to the biological transmission of genes." And my bet won within 6 years to boot! In spite of those who dismiss the power of the idea of memes (including Gould, and by the way, how does pointing out its Lamarkien nature reduce its import?), the word has now developed roots in our lexicon, and as those in the entertainment industry say, "it has legs."
Unweaving the Rainbow provides a satisfying outlook and description of science against the superstitions of the world. It gives the science lover a soaring feeling of dignity and wonder that matches the best that poetry has provided. We've known it all along, but Dawkins gives us new words to parry against our Faith infested critics.

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