When the Two Cultures Go to War, Science Loses

Richard Dawkins is not usually an author you read when you want to feel good about humanity. The Oxford professor is best known for writing The Selfish Gene, a book that theorizes that people are genetically predisposed to self-serving, exploitative behavior. People, according to Dawkins, never act in terms of what is good for the group, but only in terms of what is good for themselves. In the process of natural selection, altruists are gradually selected out, while cheaters and exploiters are left to propagate the earth and pass their genes onto more cheaters and exploiters.

If it sounds dry and disheartening, it is. Dawkins himself laments that people who read his work sometimes walk away feeling crestfallen and "depressed." And so, Dawkins' latest book, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder, resonates on a slightly more optimistic note. Although it is not an apologia for Dawkins' other books, it is a manual on how to read them. Dawkins contends that people habitually misconstrue science as deconstructive and demystifying. The average person, whose science background might not extend beyond a high school lab, has been programmed to set up a dichotomy of two domains for knowledge. Literature and the humanities are viewed as infusing wonder into the natural world, science as sucking it out. And so, people might feel "depressed" when they read something like The Selfish Gene, not because the book is innately pessimistic, but because of their innate misconceptions that every scientific theory debunks another one of life's mysteries. Of course, these misconceptions do not apply universally. Students who have chosen to study science need no persuasion from Dawkins to see the wonders of molecules and elegance of chemical reactions. But Dawkins uses Unweaving the Rainbow to try to convince the rest of the population. Dawkins contends that science and humanities are not antagonistic, but rather complementary, forces which both find truth and beauty in the natural world.

Dawkins' thesis has integrity. But the proof he offers does not. The whole title of Dawkins' book, Unweaving the Rainbow, alludes to an accusation that the romantic poet, John Keats, once directed at Newton for "unweaving the rainbow by reducing it to its prismatic colors." And so, instead of speaking of science and humanities in a broad sense, Dawkins uses Unweaving the Rainbow to function as an odd sort of rebuttal in which he accuses Keats (and every other romantic poet who criticized science) as being patently wrong. Although Dawkins' writing is lush and poetic, his approach is bizarre and confusing. Dawkins wants to say ultimately, that Newton was no different from Keats. Both made it their life's mission to seek understanding of the world around them. But what Dawkins ends up doing is attacking Keats and bathing his whole argument in the same scientific hubris to which the romantic poets objected. Some of Dawkins' claims are particularly outlandish. He declares that "Keats might have been a better poet if he had gone to science for some of his inspiration." Dawkins even quotes a few lines that a poet used to attack Newton and Bacon and comments, "What a waste of poetic talent" (the poet he was referring to, incidentally, was William Blake).

It is clear what Dawkins wants to do. It is unclear, however, why he chose romantic poetry to form the scaffolding for his argument. Dawkins is at his best when he deconstructs science, not poetry. Making the verses of Keats a central motif in the book weakens the rest of Dawkins' argument because it causes him to fall victim to fallacy. When he examines Keats' verses and claims that, in his exaltation of nature, Keats was doing the same as Newton, he is wrong. Keats was not doing the same as Newton. Certainly, in the abstract sense, they both sought truth and understanding. But while a nexus between science and literature can be found in these common goals, it cannot be found in a common approach. Keats found as much physics in nature as Newton found poetry in falling apples.

The link between science and literature is not neat and tidy; trying to impose one risks being facile and fallacious. In writing about science, Dawkins has built his popularity around prose that is rich and engaging to scientists and poets alike. But in trying too hard to link science and poetry, Dawkins threatens to alienate both audiences.