Combine Reason And Imagination

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday June 7, 2008

Reviewed by Richard King

We felt diminished when mysteries were solved but a new work brings back poetic elements.

The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing

Edited by Richard Dawkins

OUP, 419pp, $65

IT IS strange to think now of the Romantic segregation of reason and the imagination. Edgar Allan Poe's characterisation of science as a "Vulture, whose wings are dull realities" caresses the ear like so much hot air, while John Keats's charge, in Lamia, that science "will clip an Angel's wings, / Conquer all mysteries" and "Unweave a rainbow" dates him in a way that no amount of "ye"-ing or inverted syntax can. Stomping off from the astronomy lecture to gaze "in perfect silence at the stars", Walt Whitman is answered by the Hubble telescope, the pictures from which are incomparably beautiful and seem to breathe life into Albert Einstein's notion of "cosmic religious feeling". Science, we now recognise, can be a source of the numinous and no less inspirational than poetry.

Responsibility for this change in attitude can be laid at many different doors but a sizeable chunk of it should surely be laid at the door of Professor Richard Dawkins. Not only has Dawkins sought to challenge the notion that the arts and sciences are at odds - explicitly taking Keats to task in Unweaving The Rainbow (1998) - but his own writing proves the division false by being so enjoyable to read.

Indeed, if I have one criticism of his editorship of The Oxford Book Of Modern Science Writing it is that, by leaving himself out of the book, he has given a grossly inaccurate picture of science writing during the past 30 years. That is the only criticism, however, for this is a singularly brilliant anthology, one in which Dawkins brings together humanity's two great achievements - its ability to understand its environment and to transmit that understanding through language - with the discrimination that one might expect from an outstanding representative of both.

Spanning the past 100 years or so, the book is divided into four main sections ("What Scientists Study", "Who Scientists Are", "What Scientists Think" and "What Scientists Delight In"), each comprising digestible gobbets from some of the world's best science writers. Highlights include Steve Jones on hemophilia, Steven Pinker on phobias and Stephen Jay Gould on Darwin's last years ("Most eminent greybeards sum up their life's thought and give a few pompous suggestions for reconstituting the future. Charles Darwin wrote about worms.").

Each is introduced by Dawkins, often in amusing and personal fashion. (Alister Hardy, his first professor, is described as "a strabismically beaming cross between Peter Pan and the Ancient Mariner".)

The best science writing, it seems to me, combines two senses of the verb "to wonder": to wonder about (to speculate) and to wonder at (to be amazed). Such writing is closely related to poetry, in that it describes the familiar in unfamiliar ways. But whereas the poet proceeds by metaphor, analogy or dazzling combinations of words, the scientist's stock-in-trade is facts. This description of a storm by Edward O. Wilson is taken beyond mere brilliance by the information underpinning it:

"The forest erupted in a simulation of violent life. Lightning bolts broke to the front and then closer, to the right and left, 10,000 volts dropping along an ionising path at 800 kilometres an hour, kicking a countersurge skyward 10 times faster, back and forth in a split second, the whole perceived as a single flash and crack of sound. The wind freshened, and rain came stalking through the forest."

Keats asked, referring to natural philosophy, "Do not all charms fly / At the mere touch of cold philosophy?" On the contrary, such passages throw the reader into an entirely new relationship with the world. They press "refresh" on reality.

This is not to say, however, that science does not play a debunking role. This book is full of ingenious instances of demystification. For example, there is J.B.S. Haldane, who shows that all creatures have an optimum size and that observations such as the common one that if a flea was as big as a human being it could jump a thousand feet in the air are thus unscientific nonsense. No doubt it was with relish that he chose to demonstrate his thesis thus:

"An angel whose muscles developed no more power weight for weight than those of an eagle or a pigeon would require a breast projecting for about four feet to house the muscles engaged in working its wings, while to economise its weight, its legs would have to be reduced to mere stilts."

The resentment some people feel towards science stems from the sense that its evolution has entrained a series of demotions for mankind. First, we learn that our little planet is, as Loren Eiseley puts it, "a dust mote in the void of night". Second, and at the other end of the scale, our "dominion" over the beasts of the earth is brought into question by the realisation that a significant proportion of them (germs, bacteria) actually have dominion over us. But the kind of mindset that regards these discoveries as injurious to the species ego ignores the fact of just how special people had to be in order to make the discoveries in the first place.

This wonderful book gives the lie to such gloom. It is not without justice that Dawkins characterises it as "a celebration of humanity".

© 2008 Sydney Morning Herald

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