On unweaving the rainbow

In early nineteenth-century London, the British literary elite gathered at private dinners to drink, discuss poetry and philosophy, and occasionally mock the pretensions of science.

At one such dinner, around 1817, John Keats met fellow Romantic poet William Wordsworth at the London workshop of the painter and critic Benjamin Haydon.

As Haydon recounts, at one point during this ‘immortal dinner’, having drunk a bit too much, one of them began to rail against Newton, “a fellow who believed nothing unless it was as clear as the three sides of a triangle.” Keats eagerly continued the attack. In the opinion of these Romantics, Newton had destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to the colors of the prism. Finally, they all raised their glasses: “To Newton’s health, and confusion to mathematics!”

This is the anecdote that sets off *Unweaving the Rainbow* (1998), the book Richard Dawkins wrote as an ode to the “appetite for wonder” that inspires science. Within its pages, Dawkins takes the opportunity to warn against bad poetry in science, but his conclusion is the opposite: “Science is poetic, ought to be poetic, has much to learn from poets and should press good poetic imagery and metaphor into its inspirational service.”

Curiously, one of the most bastardized scientific metaphors is his own, and it gives the title to another of his books. *The Selfish Gene*, from 1976, was one of the first books that made me feel that understanding the world could itself be a source of aesthetic pleasure. Without a doubt, it is the book that most profoundly changed my view of the world, and it was within its pages that I developed a sensitivity I had not known before.

Despite my early exposure to poetry and literature (after all, I grew up in a hippie household in Patagonia), it was my encounter with Dawkins that allowed me to appreciate the delights of the “greatest show on Earth”: evolution. I must give credit to my parents for placing a copy of this book alongside others on permaculture and The Teachings of Don Juan.

“I believe that an orderly universe, one indifferent to human preoccupations, in which everything has an explanation even if we still have a long way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more wonderful place than a universe tricked out with capricious, ad hoc magic.” — Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow (1998)

I fondly remember bus rides spent reading about animal behaviors shaped by evolution, and how different environments could turn those behaviors into strengths or weaknesses. In particular, I remember standing on the bus reading a chapter that described how certain birds of the cuckoo family ‘parasitize’ the nests of other birds, laying their eggs there to be hatched. In this arms race between species, the winner is whichever achieves the best imitation or manages to identify it in time.

The book offered dozens of different stories. At that time, I had barely had the chance to talk about evolutionary biology, but I couldn’t believe the world opening up before me. How could a creationist story — in which an all-powerful being created a universe at will and then designed every single thing inside it — seem more marvelous to me than a story that completely dispenses with a creator?

Contrary to what the Romantics who questioned Newton might have argued, the scientific perspective on the world, far from removing magic, reveals it as an inexhaustible source of wonder. The most beautiful aspect of scientific work is, without a doubt, the constant effort to discover the secret behind the trick.

Even more beautiful is realizing that for this kind of magic, no magician is needed.

Bertrand Russell famously celebrated the fresh air of science, even when it might make us shiver “after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths.” In the same vein, I believe that rejecting scientific discourse as dehumanizing, cold, or lacking in poetry is not only wrong but also a bit lazy. Not only do the comforting stories often prized over scientific discourse leave aside the pleasure of wonder, but they generally work directly against it. Instead of launching us into the world to try to understand it, to strive to grasp how things work, they often replace curiosity with reassurance.

It’s not that poetry is a bad thing — quite the opposite. The bad thing is to assert a false dichotomy between poetic narrative and scientific narrative. Science, in a certain way, is poetry, and as such it is motivated by the search for wonder and experimentation to satisfy it.

There is an enormous contrast between banality and wonder, between disinterest and ecstasy, between disaffection with the here and now and letting ourselves be captivated by the present. Comforting myths are largely responsible for our mental habits. Those stories that make us feel good, even when false, become our comfort zone and isolate us from new stimuli, dissolving our interest in embracing more reality.

The wonderful thing about the scientific perspective on the universe is that it constantly renews our capacity for surprise. In science there are no ultimate truths, nothing is indisputable. Even the smallest detail can be enriched by the philosophy and tools that science provides us. In a curious coincidence with Wordsworth, science also argues that with enough attention, even the tiniest fragment of reality invites us to marvel.

Even if we discovered that humans are not the only species capable of forming theories about the universe, it would still remain our responsibility to seek out perplexity. Alan Watts once suggested that we are “the universe experiencing itself.” Taken literally, the phrase quickly collapses into ambiguity, but as poetry it captures something difficult to ignore: that consciousness allows the universe to become aware of its own existence, however partially.

There are moments when our experience of the universe becomes more meaningful; moments that mark us in such a way that they never quite leave us; moments when we feel that the lived experience is so different that we have never felt it before. These are moments of inspiration, which can be traced to the Greek πνέω or pnéō, “to breathe”: letting the air invade us.

Those are the moments that reconfigure our experience of the universe, and it is hard for anyone to argue that what results from them is not poetry.

“The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that makes life worth living and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have for living it is finite.” — Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow (1998)

As long as our appetite for the unknown remains unsatisfied and we still have the capacity for wonder, we have a moral duty to be in awe.

“Dawn of Morning, Lake George” by Jasper Francis Cropsey (1868).

This text was originally sent on July 30th, 2017 through Cómo funcionan las cosas, in Spanish.

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