Dawkins takes to heart his title of Charles Simonyi Professor of Public Understanding of Science at Oxford in this thoughtful exegesis on the nature of science and why its detractors are all wrong. More with pity than anger, he takes Keats to task for faulting “cold philosophy” for unweaving the rainbow in the long poem “Lamia.” On the contrary, Dawkins observes, Newton’s use of a prism to split white light into the spectrum not only led to our understanding of how rainbows form in raindrops, but enabled astronomers to read the make-up of stars. Dawkins devotes a few chapters to debunking astrology, magic, and clairvoyance, arguing that, as rational adults, we need to be critical about ideas. This notion serves him handily in chapters on coincidence: He explains the exacting calculations of probabilities to show that coincidences aren—t so unusual. Yet people have a penchant for finding patterns where there are none, which leads Dawkins also to address superstitions, the class of errors known as false positives and false negatives, and a wealth of cultural practices from rain dances to human sacrifice. He takes to task what he calls bad poetic science, in which he includes the theories of his rival Stephen Jay Gould in relation to what Gould sees as the three perennial questions in paleontology: Does time have a directional arrow? Do internal or external forces drive evolution? And does evolution occur gradually or in jumps? The spleen’s so heavy here that one can anticipate a debate, if not a duel. Final chapters provide him with a platform for reweaving the rainbow, enlarging on his earlier themes and metaphors in relation to memes, genes, and evolution. The speculative writing here is less rooted in complex gene analysis than in philosophy of the Dennett school. A sharp mind is much in evidence, delighting in exposing fraud, providing instruction, baiting a colleague, and indulging in his own high-wire acts of evolutionary dreaming.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-395-88382-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1998
Omni reporter Regis, who glanced at nanotechnology in Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition (1990), here turns to full-scale investigation of the subject. Of all the late-20th-century scientific frontiers, none seems quite so brave as nanotechnology, the endeavor to build machines the size of molecules that will be able to create any desired end product, from a filet mignon to a Porsche, using grass clippings or household trash as the raw material. Writing a book about it is not easy, since results are still scanty and its theory depends heavily on math and engineering data that few general readers would find congenial. Regis attempts to solve this problem by following the career of K. Eric Drexler, who came up with the idea of nanotech as an MIT student in the early '70s and has since become the leading figure of the new discipline. Drexler's road has not been easy. Chemists, physicists, and others who saw nanotech as poaching on their established fields were quick to label his early proposals ``pure science fiction'' and to point out theoretical and practical difficulties in bringing the technology into being. Drexler stuck to his guns and gradually saw many of his ideas accepted with the arrival of such tools as the scanning tunneling microscope, which is capable of manipulating individual atoms. Designing mechanical parts to be built one atom at a time has kept him busy, even though not a single working nanotech machine has been built to date. But the reader emerges with a feeling that they will be built and with some idea of how the world will change when they finally are. The author, clearly a nanotech booster, all but canonizes Drexler while portraying doubting scientists as dinosaurs. Despite the cheerleading, a clear and readable account of the new discipline's brief but exciting history. (16 b&w illustrations)
Pub Date: April 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-316-73858-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
An eclectic survey of contemporary scientific thought and attitudes. Brockman (Einstein, Gertrude Stein, Wittgenstein and Frankenstein, 1986, etc.) and Matson (Short Lives, 1980, etc.) liken reading this collection of essays to being in a room full of scientists and posing one question to each of them. Forget asking questions, these thinkers are out to tell you the issues that are resonant in their lives. Thirty-four essays elucidate some important scientific concepts like evolution and quantum theory. But more significantly, these writings show us how scientists think: how their methodology tackles both the grandiose and the particular and how following the side streets of traditional theory can lead to unexpected conclusions. Authored by British and American academics, the collection is divided into six sections; Thinking About Science, Origins, Evolution, Mind, Cosmos, and the Future. While some authors demonstrate the scientific community's inclination to speak to laypeople as if they were talking to children (Marian Stamp Dawkins writes that ``understanding how things work, even your own brain, has a grandeur and a glory that no nonscientific explanation can come anywhere near''), most of the writers resist oversimplification. Some works are notable for their clarity. Stephen Jay Gould's humbling explanation of evolutionary theory, which concludes that we are ``a small, late-blooming, and ultimately transient twig on the copiously arborescent tree of life.'' Michael S. Gazzaniga discusses the misguided reliance on averages and statistical information in the effort to ``find relationships in an otherwise noisy set of data.'' Others are strikingly original: Ann Fausto-Sterling describes same-sex couplings in animals, and David Gelernter brings together disparate arguments on computer science and reading the Talmud to support his lucid critique of multiculturalism. Varied and invigorating, these essays are a light, but not insubstantial, read.
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-688-13356-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
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