Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder
Richard Dawkins
Language: English
Pages: 352
ISBN: 0618056734
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This is the book Richard Dawkins was meant to write: a brilliant assessment of what science is (and isn't), a tribute to science not because it is useful but because it is uplifting.
Stem Cell Dialogues: A Philosophical and Scientific Inquiry Into Medical Frontiers
The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA
illuminating). They are generalists, opportunists, carrying genes that helped their ancestors to survive through probably a considerable range of ways of life; and pre-agricultural genes are in them yet. Anybody attempting to 'read' their genes may find a confusing palimpsest of ancestral world descriptions. From earlier still, the DNA of all mammals must describe aspects of very ancient environments as well as more recent ones. The DNA of a camel was once in the sea, but it hasn't been there
have a thermometer calibrated in pulse rates. Actually, this is not a good code because it is uneconomical with pulses. By exploiting redundancy, it is possible to devise codes that convey the same information at a cost of fewer pulses. Temperatures in the world mostly stay the same for long periods at a time. To signal 'It is hot, it is hot, it is still hot...' by a continuously high rate of machine-gun pulses is wasteful; it is better to say, 'It has suddenly become hot' (now you can assume
and feel cheated if it is explained. They are the ones who love a good ghost story, whose mind leaps to poltergeists or miracles whenever something even faintly odd happens. They never lose an opportunity to quote Hamlet's There are mare things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. and the scientist's response ('Yes, but we're working on it') strikes no chord with them. For them, to explain away a good mystery is to be a killjoy, just as some Romantic poets
so-called Optimal Foraging Theory. Wild birds show quite sophisticated abilities to assess, statistically, the relative food-richness of different areas and they switch their time between the areas accordingly. Back in the laboratory, Skinner founded a large school of research using Skinner boxes for all kinds of detailed purposes. Then, in 1948, he tried a brilliant variant on the standard technique. He completely severed the causal link between behaviour and reward. He set up the apparatus to
shower of rain. Even worse is to claim catastrophism under the same punctuationist umbrella. In pre-Darwinian times the existence of fossils became increasingly embarrassing for upholders of biblical creation. Some hoped to drown the problem in Noah's flood, but why did the strata seem to show dramatic replacements of whole faunas, each one different from its predecessor, and all of them largely free of our own, familiar creatures? The answer given by, among others, the nineteenth-century French
