Unweaving the Rainbow
Cover of the first edition
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| Author | Richard Dawkins |
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| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Evolutionary biology |
| Publisher | Houghton Mifflin |
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Publication date
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1998 |
| Media type | Print, e-book |
| Pages | 336 pp. |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 45155530 |
| Preceded by | Climbing Mount Improbable |
| Followed by | A Devil's Chaplain |
Unweaving the Rainbow (subtitled "Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder") is a 1998 book by Richard Dawkins, discussing the relationship between science and the arts from the perspective of a scientist.
Dawkins addresses the misperception that science and art are at odds. Driven by the responses to his books The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker wherein readers resented his naturalistic world view, seeing it as depriving life of meaning, Dawkins felt the need to explain that, as a scientist, he saw the world as full of wonders and a source of pleasure. This pleasure was not in spite of, but rather because he does not assume as cause the inexplicable actions of a deity but rather the understandable laws of nature.
His starting point is John Keats' well-known, light-hearted accusation that Isaac Newton destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by 'reducing it to the prismatic colours.' (Incidentally, Newton did no such thing: it was Theodoric of Freiberg who discovered rainbows were prismatic. Newton's famous discovery with prisms was recombination of a spectrum back into white light.) The agenda of the book is to show the reader that science does not destroy, but rather discovers poetry in the patterns of nature.
The following summary of the book's arguments in favour of science does not attempt to reproduce the actual explanations of scientific phenomena (how DNA works, petwhac, etc.), which in fact form most of the text.
It is of little concern whether or not science can prove that the ultimate fate of the cosmos lacks purpose: we live our lives regardless at a "human" level, according to ambitions and perceptions which come more naturally. Therefore, science should not be feared as a sort of cosmological wet blanket. In fact, those in search of beauty or poetry in their cosmology need not turn to the paranormal or even necessarily restrict themselves to the mysterious: science itself, the business of unravelling mysteries, is beautiful and poetic. (The rest of the preface sketches an outline of the book, makes acknowledgements, etc.)
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