In his preface to Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion, and the Appetite for Wonder, Oxford zoologist and evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins relates a publisher's reaction to his first book, The Selfish Gene: "He confessed that he could not sleep for three nights after reading it, so troubled was he by what he saw as its cold, bleak message." Dawkins's message, delivered with eloquence and verve in all of his books, is that life's abundance and variety on our planet is not evidence of a grand, overarching purpose in the universe, but is due to the fundamental physical and chemical properties of matter, the driving force of natural selection, a mechanism of heredity as embodied in the gene, and the selfish "desire" for genes to be represented in future generations. Albert Camus referred to the "benign indifference of the universe" in The Stranger. This view has seemingly been buttressed by much of the science of the last half century. As quoted by Dawkins, physicist Peter Atkins refers to "the bleakness we have to accept as we peer deeply and dispassionately into the heart of the Universe." Atkins's colleague, Steven Weinberg, has landed in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations with "The more the universe seems comprehensible the more it seems pointless."

On the face of it, then, there is reason for insomnia. But as Dawkins points out, the indifference of the universe is, by and large, irrelevant insofar as "our lives are ruled by all sorts of closer, warmer, human ambitions and perceptions." This is obvious enough, but Dawkins, as his many readers know, is too enraptured by science to leave it at that. His aim in this book is to give the lay reader a picture of the grandeur and beauty of the universe as revealed by science. In effect he is responding to the suggestion made by Jacques Monod, in his book Chance and Necessity, that science "has conquered its place in society - in men's practice, but not in their hearts." Dawkins's title is from a poem by Keats, who suggested that Newton destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by explaining it in terms of the prism. From this starting point, Dawkins argues throughout the book that a scientific understanding of "poetic" phenomena such as the rainbow, starlight, audio and visual perception, and other manifestations of electromagnetic radiation only enhances our lives and serves, rather than detracts from, human imagination.

That Dawkins is well suited to this project is beyond question. His books are highly anticipated, both by the professional community of evolutionary biologists, to which he has made a significant contribution with works like The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene, and by lay readers, for works like The Blind Watchmaker, River Out of Eden, and Climbing Mount Improbable. Indeed, the last contains many examples of Dawkins's skill at finding poetic phenomena where others detect only dry science. It could be argued, of course, that Dawkins is using Keats as a straw man. Those who are most resistant to the story that science has to tell us may actually be few, and unlikely to be convinced by the arguments of one of its practitioners (especially Dawkins, whose rhetoric tends to take on a slightly mocking, incredulous quality toward muddled or magical thinking). That criticism aside, most open-minded and sympathetic readers will likely be caught up in the grace and clarity of Dawkins's prose.

The first third of Unweaving the Rainbow is Dawkins at his best. He uses Keats's criticism of Newton's "unweaving the rainbow" to launch into a discussion of how a modern understanding of the electromagnetic spectrum has given us an awe-inspiring view of the size and age of the universe and of human perception. He relates this beautifully with the metaphor of bar codes - whether referring to the red-shifted lines of spectroscopy that reveal an expanding universe or to the brain's unconscious "unweaving" of the sound waves that constantly pepper our eardrums. Dawkins argues that in each case science is an antidote to "the anaesthetic of familiarity." He explains:

Dawkins closes with a chapter on the evolution of the human brain. Part standard evolutionary theory, part ingenious speculation, he proposes a number of possible explanations for the dramatic evolutionary increase in the size of the human brain. Even Dawkins, the ultimate scientific optimist, acknowledges that this mystery is unsolved and may be for some time. Undeterred, he holds that the demonstrated power of the human brain to piece together a model of the universe as it really is, with everything from quarks to DNA to black holes, provides all the meaning of existence we could ever want. Is this a philosophy to hold close to your heart? Read it and see.

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