Krishna
We have reviewed, and liked, The Ancestor’s Tale by the same author earlier here.
In comparison, I would rank this book a bit lower. Why? Read on.
This book is also about why evolution is true but it comes at a different angle – related to why science is vilified by the romantic poets as ‘removing the mystery and romance in the world’ and why this aspersion is not true. Rather, science can be the source of wonder more than any poetry can inspire, if viewed the right way.
The title comes from a poem by Keats. He laments that Newton ‘killed the mystery and the romance’ of the rainbow by ‘emotionlessly unweaving it and proving that it is caused by diffraction of light’. Likewise many people complain that science is taking humanity to a bleak realization that all this is purposeless and is ‘killing all hope of humanity’.
Richard shows why science is fascinating and equally inspiring as good poetry. He explains that looking for what makes something tick does not take away from the mystery of the thing but enhances the sense of wonder in worldly things.
The book goes on in this vein to talk about why science does not steal the beauty of arts like poetry or drama but only enhances it by adding layers to it for appreciation through another viewpoint. He repeatedly talks about Woodworth, Keats, Coleridge and others saying that scientists suck the joy out of things by demystifying them or that science is hard and so should be dumbed down to make it available to larger audiences to get more people to be interested in the scientific discipline.
For the latter, he rightly says that deceiving people into believing science is simpler than it is – or making science artificially cheap for ‘fun’ – is not going to help as people who would ultimately study science will have to encounter the ‘hard part’ anyway. Also he says that just like people who cannot compose music can still enjoy music, people who do not want to study the scientific details – the hard maths for instance – can also enjoy scientific concepts.
He talks about colours and how ultimately all colour is ‘fiction’ woven by the mind based on the receptors in the eye. He talks about the dual folding of protein which when it folds ‘bad’ causes a lot of illnesses and death and when it folds ‘right’ as in the rods within the eye, helps us discern colour and provide other useful functions.
As for DNA evidence, he covers what it is – in fact only a known part of DNA which is highly variable is matched when the labs do a DNA match and not the whole genome. He also covers how lawyers ignorantly or wilfully exploit the confusion about the odds of the match to win cases.
He talks of evolution and why several prominent writers including Stephen J Gould have got parts of it spectacularly wrong, especially about evolution ‘following a different and more fecund path’ during the Cambrian explosion. The arguments definitely make sense.
He goes a bit into the ‘old’ territory covered by his earlier book The Selfish Gene, but even here, you get new scientific tidbits. You learn that, unlike most creatures – example for humans, male chromosomes come in two unlike parts – the famous XY while female chromosomes are both identical XX. In birds, you learn, they are reversed where the equivalent of XY is in females and that of XX in males. Interesting.
Towards the end, the book seems to lose its way a bit and the comparison of meme transmission as well as how some tunes get stuck in the mind seem to be a bit out of topic and also far fetched comparison to evolution and bacterial and viral spread.
Still, it largely keeps your interest and I think I can give it a 5/10.
= = Krishna