Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite
for Wonder
Dawkins, Richard
Houghton Mifflin 1998
ISBN 0-395-88382-2
323pp
Date finished: 2003-03-20
[Buy this book] (why?)
This book is Dawkins's meditation on the relationship between the rational world of science and the, let me say, less rational world of poetry. Unfortunately it's not really a success, because Dawkins never quite manages to express what he means by poetic science. He comes closest in the three "Barcodes" chapters, but there's also a recurring concern with trivia, such as there are 500 miles of blood vessels in the human body, that sort of thing, along with a good discussion of DNA evidence . There are some interesting ruminations on selfish genes and on consciousness in the later chapters, but they don't unify the book, and it remains a ragbag.