In Our Time - Science's Revelations

Episode Date: October 29, 1998

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss whether the mass of scientific understanding and knowledge we have accumulated has destroyed our sense of poetic wonder at the world. Has our sense of awe at how the world works obscured our desire to know why it works the way it does? With Richard Dawkins evolutionary biologist, reader in Zoology and Fellow of New College, Oxford, Charles Simonyi Chair of Public Understanding of Science, Oxford University and author of Unweaving The Rainbow: Science, Delusion and The Appetite For Wonder; Ian McEwan, novelist, and author of the Booker prize winning novel Amsterdam.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, my guest today, Richard Dawkins, whose book Unweaving the Rainbow has just been published, and Ian McKeown, whose novel Enduring Love, a tale of rationalism, romanticism, and religion at odds with one another,

has recently been successfully launched in paperback. His new novel is Amsterdam. Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow, Most people think that comes, it takes off from Wordsworth, but in fact you take off from Keats. Keats complained that Newton had spoiled all the poetry of the rainbow by unweaving it, by explaining it. And I've just taken this as a sort of symbol

for the reluctance that some poetic minds have to embrace science. And I'm really trying to say, the poetic mind should be embracing science as one of the most poetic things that they could possibly experience and inspiration for great poetry. So it's almost to sort of take Keats by the hand and say, come on, look at science again, you'd love it.

According to Hayden's memo, which you quote, what Keats said was, he destroyed the poetry of the rainbow, this is Newton. He destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to a prism. Now you don't think a prism is a reduction at all, do you? Well, in one sense it's reducing. It's taking white light, which is a mixture of all lights, and then reducing it to the different colours that compose it. But that's not reducing in any kind of demeaning sense.

I mean, you reduce the, you reduce white light to its component colours. That's analysis. You're breaking it apart. You're dissecting it. But that's helping to understand. And it's just a symbol for understanding the world and the universe as a whole. And then, of course, you come to get, you come back and synthesize a picture of the world, a world picture, which is a beautiful and coherent entity in itself.

But let's just explain the hinge of the book a little more because you again quote from Keats, from Lamia, where he says, do not all charms fly at the mere touch of people. cold philosophy, meaning in his case, in his time, natural sciences in a way. There was an awful rainbow once in heaven, awful meaning full of all, and it is gone. And the book is shot through with quotations from poets and quotations from scientists and philosophers. And it is an attack on what you call bad understanding. It is actually, it's an attack on the idea of awe being sufficient, isn't it? Or is my starting point with science.

I feel intense awe, but as you say, it's not sufficient. It's the starting point to understand. So we begin with awe. And a scientist really yields to no one in the feeling of awe that we have when we contemplate the universe. But then we say, now we're working on understanding it, now we want to break it down, now we want to build it back up again to understand.

One of the particular passages in your book, and it's full of glittering passages like this, is when you do unweave the rainbow. So we all see the rainbow. Everybody knows rainbows, and when you look at them, your heart does leap up, doesn't it? You say, look, there's a rainbow. the window. Now you unweave it. Could you unweave it for us now? The rainbow is a spectrum and Newton did it in a

rather more simple way with a prism. He simply let white light from the sun go through a slit into a prism. The prism then bends the light through an angle which is different for each of the component wavelengths that are in the white light because white light is a mixture of red, green, blue, etc. out to violet. They bend through different angles when they go from air into glass and this separates out the rainbow.

So what unweaving the rainbow, what Newton did, was to show that white light is a mixture of other lights. What we now know is that the rainbow is only a tiny tiny fragment of the whole electromagnetic spectrum which extends all the way

up to radio waves at the long wave end and down to x-rays at the short wave end. You developed that in your chapter on barcodes in the stars, do you? And so how far does that take us? Can you just develop that a little more? One way to put it is a way that Edward Wilson has put it in his book, conciliance, is that humans up until the scientific era were almost blind because they were limited to seeing in the visible spectrum,

which is this minute little fraction of the whole electromagnetic spectrum, almost blind, just seeing through this tiny chink, this tiny window. And now we can see using radio waves, we can see to the furthest reaches of the universe using the whole electromagnetic spectrum. So we've science has enormously enlarged our vision of this place in which we find ourselves. Those outside science, and using the word poet is as good a metaphor,

it's a very good metaphor. So those who feel outside science, Sometimes, even when they're very sympathetic to it, like Orden, the poet, Orden, whom you quote, feel a bit rejected by it. I mean, Orden, who was a man of science himself, said, the true man of action in our time, who has transformed the world are not politicians, but scientists. Unfortunately, poetry cannot celebrate them because their deeds are concerned with things,

not persons, and therefore speechless. When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate, who's wanted my mistake into a drawing room full of dukes. What do you think about that? business and being speechless. The poet feeling speechless. The first thing I'd say is that I've always felt as a scientist I'm wandering into a drawing room full of dukes when I'm with poets so and I think a lot of scientists do that. I don't quite understand that remark of Orden about poetry must be speechless about science. I sort of feel that poetry should be anything

but speechless about science and so I'm a little bit baffled about that and in a way my whole message is that poets should not be speechless about science. Ian McKeown, you, let's take the novel Enduring Love. Now, I can pay it back as I said, where you have a scientist as a chief character, and you talk about science a lot, and you use science. Do you share Orden's position that you feel you're in a drawing room full of dukes, rather like a shabby curate, or do you feel it's something you can take on and bring in? Well, I think it's something to take on and bring in, especially now.

I mean, I think Richard's book is particularly interesting, because it lies right at the centre of what I would regard as a lot. heroic age of biology. And in this time, scientists, particularly biologists, are talking about things that I don't think they permitted themselves 20 years ago. Consciousness, human nature. Things that novelist look after. In fact, they're on our patch. That's right. So we have a lot to learn from them, and it's interesting too that many of our best scientists, science writers, Richard included, are highly literate. In other words, there's a conversation being going on for centuries about human nature or about the difference between men and women, for example.

And scientists are joining this conversation, not only to tell us, but also absorbing them, taking it in. So I think there is a great deal of exchange going on, especially in this area of biology. But there is the, coming back to Orden, who had the advantage of reading science at Oxford, and he was a man who knew his science, particularly geology, and he kept it up, and he has metaphors about science. When you've made yourself very well acquainted with science, indeed, over the past few years and you write about it and so on. Do you actually feel that it helps your imagination when you're writing fiction?

Is it like Graham Green going to a different country in the world and coming back with information from that? Or is it like something which stimulates part of your mind that would not otherwise have been stimulated in a more central intellectual way? What's it like? Well, I would come to a central concept in Richard's book about the anesthetic of familiarly.

You know, we live in this extraordinary world. We take it entirely for granted because we've come to consciousness of it, you know, slowly through our babyhood. If we were to arrive here, as it were, from across the universe, we would be astonished. Both poets and scientists share at least that as a starting point to de-anesthetizers from that familiarity.

So I take a lot from science directly to the imagination. Something more than just saying, wow, or isn't it extraordinary? an example. I mean, from enduring love, there are many examples where I've got the block marked up here, much better if you come from you. Can you give me an example where you're using science as a way to describe something which previously you'd have described in a more, in a non-scientific way? Okay, I don't think, for example, I could have described five men hanging on the ropes of a balloon trying to keep it down. A hot air balloon, this is going up. This balloon is going up, they're being lifted off the ground. They have to make a quick decision. If they all hang on together, they can get this balloon down. If one of them breaks ranks, then suddenly there's no point in being altruistic and hanging on. The language of that,

altruism versus selfishness, the game theory of that is drawn directly from a discussion that's been going on amongst evolutionists and biologists and economists also drawing from it for some years.

So it adds to my sense of what could be done with this. I mean, it generates more drama for me because there's a way of describing it, a really interesting way. Do you both of you, I mean, do you think that thinking about science, and Manuel, I think, has written extremely well about this, thinking about science is different in a way than thinking about fiction.

You thinking, Richard, about genes and from the selfishly in or not so, you're thinking about how to create books. Is it a different, energies being employed, are different areas being tapped? Have you got, because you, this book is full of quotations from Perth, so you've obviously got an enormous affection, Well, I suppose there's got to be a certain difference in that a scientific proposition is then tested, and scientific language is rather more public, so different scientists in different parts of the world tackling the same problem ought to get the same answer because they ought to have access to the same results.

But so much of science is imagination, so much of deciding what to test, what experiments to do, is a piece of sheer creative imagination. and people... Can you give us an example? Well, Einstein, I suppose. I mean, Einstein's great gift was huge imagination, a wonderful way of letting his mind soar away from the mundane. Thought experiments, really?

Yes, thought experiments. And, of course, once Einstein had exerted his genius in this way, eventually experimental physicists, and observational physicists could come along and verify his predictions. but the imaginative step, I suppose, is very much what poets should be able to empathise with. What's your take on this? This is a very interesting example, actually, Einstein.

Stephen Weinberg, in his book on physics, was talking about how the elegance of Einstein's theories probably were instrumental in its gaining very wide acceptance very quickly. Penrose says that, actually, that the elegance was that which attracted him. Well, actually, the experimental data, and there were endless trips out to observe. of eclipses of the sun to see if starlight was being bent as a theory should predict. But they were only accurate within about 10%, which actually was not enough. And it was not till radio astronomy in the 50s, that there was proper hard evidence, as it were.

And yet the theories were in the textbooks by the late 20s. It had a kind of beauty that, you know, that beauty and truth that Keats wrote so famously of clearly helped it in being established in the minds of other scientists. You say, Richard, you say in a chapter on the selfish cooperator, you say the balance of my book is, science is poetic, you say, and ought to be poetic, has much to learn from poets and should press good poetic imagery and metaphor

into its inspirational service. What does it have to learn from poets? I've always used metaphor, and not just to get points across to other people, but actually to think for myself. So something like the selfish cooperator, which you've just mentioned, the genetic book of the dead, which is, I think, the next chapter after that. Now, that's, I don't want to glorify it by saying it's good poetry or anything,

but it's poetry in the sense that it is an imaginative metaphor, which is designed to make one think. And what that one means is that all living creatures carry around in themselves, in their genes, a detailed description of the worlds in which their ancestors live. I want to come to good and bad poetry in a minute because you attack bad poetic science but before we, I wouldn't like to just flip over what Ian referred to the what you call the anesthetic of familiarity

which Ian saw as something that novelists and poets engage on trying to awaken us up to familiarity. Can you give us some examples? You give some wonderful examples in the book that squid, the chameleon, the basking shark and so and if you can just give us one or two examples of what you see as the familiarity

to which we are anethitized. and why that is something we should look at with a sense of wonder and we don't? We spend most of our lives surrounded by other human beings and we interact with them in very ordinary ways and we like them or we dislike them, we argue with them, we quarrel with them,

we love them, whatever it might be. We forget that those other human beings that we're interacting with are gigantic metropolises of not just cells but of bacteria within cells because each one of our cells is a small town of symbiotic bacteria that perhaps two or three thousand million years ago were once free living,

and then about a thousand million years ago, a little bit longer ago, came together in cells. So every one of your cells, every one of the cells of your friends, of the Prime Minister, everyone, is a town of bacteria. And you yourself are a gigantic city, a megalopolis, of cells, one of which is a town of bacteria. If when you look at somebody you realise that, then immediately you're seeing,

you've stripped away the anaesthetic of familiarity. You're seeing something which is true and always has been true, but which you didn't realise. And I think your life is enriched for realising that. Yes, another very good example, I think, from Richard's book. He takes us through the means by which the brain constructs vision. I mean, the richness that we see. one's tempted to feel it's just falling on a screen of the retina

and the brain is simply, you know, reporting as it were what's there. In fact, it's, I think your analogies with virtual reality are very instructive, actually. You give us an example of those kind of hollowed out faces that you might buy in a party shop. When you look at it from the wrong side, the hollow side, the desire of the brain to make a face, or face, face, face, face, as you, put it, does create the sense of a projecting image towards the eye. We tried this out, and it's actually very exciting. Yes.

And really does take you straight to that extraordinary thing that we take for granted. Our rich visual worlds constructed without our knowing. And this book is saying to poet to everyone who's not a scientist, look, scientists can increase your sense of all, can increase your sense of one, and can change your sense of perception right in the whole of life. It's also, and it's a great defender of science and an embrace of focus, but it's also an attack on various persons and movements which are against this politically correct culture as with Kennewickman or X-Files

or some of Stephen Jay Gould's theories, particularly because, as you say, he writes so well and is so persuasive. Can you give us a line on what sort of, You're often bad poetry you're attacking and why you're attacking it. Yes, well, you've been through in that. It's not just bad poetry. It's also pseudoscience, which is another matter. And I take it that's not what we want to talk about now.

But bad poetry, because some scientific writers are so skilled with words and with language and with images and with poetic images with metaphor, it is possible to be seduced. And the main example, I suppose, that I, use in the chapter on bad poetry is the idea of the Cambrian explosion, the idea that about 520 million years ago, it's almost as though life just suddenly arrived or multicellular life, the main philer of life, the mollusks and the arthropods and the vertebrates and things, just suddenly sprang into existence from nothing. Now this has been graphically and poetically

written about and it's an idea that grabs you. It's a very imaginative, very exciting idea that in this brief period between 530 million and 520 million years ago life suddenly sprang on the scene and tried all kinds of experiments

and was flexing its muscles and was feeling its oats and all these sorts of ideas for which I think there's really rather little evidence and I suspect that actually evolution back in the Cambrian area back 520 million years ago was probably pretty much the same

as it is now. The same kind of process of Darwinian selection was going on. And we have been seduced and misled by powerful bad poetry. Why do you think he's bad though? What disturbs you about that seduction? That particular seduction, I think what's

bad about it is that it gives people the idea that it's possible for something as complicated as the mollusk body plan or the vertebrate body plan to arrive overnight. What you have to remember is that evolution is a slow and gradual process

and that once upon a time mollusks and vertebrates, mollusks and humans indeed, had a common ancestor and then a short time after that the mollusk ancestor and the vertebrate ancestor were different species

in the same genus. They were very closely related. Shortly after that they were different genera in the same family, etc. Now that had to be a gradual divergence. Nobody would deny that.

if they actually think about it. But do you take no account whatsoever? Do you give no credit whatsoever to Fred Hoyle's admittedly, rather discredited idea, that some movements forward have been caused by objects from other parts of space landing on the earth, as we know something did 65 million years ago. It's supposed to wipe out the dinosaurs, landing on earth, and then something coming from that. Could that not have been a cause of a rapid development of bodies not there before?

Well, when things land from outer space, as they did 65 million, years ago, that, if that theory is true, wiped out the dinosaurs and left the world clean and free for a new adaptive radiation, which was the mammals. Now, that probably did happen, and it's an exciting, if a rather gloomy, in some ways, view of life, that every now and again catastrophes happen, and most of life is wiped out, and then there's a new flowering. But the Fred Horil idea, which is that the projectile from outer space not only wipes things out for a fresh start, but actually brings some sort of genetic information, which is then used. That, I think, well, it is science fiction. Fred Hall happens to be a brilliant science fiction writer.

I love his science fiction, but there is no evidence for it, and there's no need for it either, because the existing more parsimonious theory will do very nicely to explain what did happen. I'd like to come back to the body of the book and turn to Ian McKeown. Ian, you called yourself a natural skeptic. You've said, I'm quoting, we've put it. pushed God into his last redoubts, down among the quarks and bosons, or out there in some remote black hole. There's no need for him here on Earth.

Well, no need for him here on Earth to explain the biosphere. Well, I haven't got to explain the biosphere. We don't actually need him as a... I mean, I would assume that it's a reasonable method of... a working method for a scientist to say, well, God may or may not exist, but let's see how far we can get in our explanations without him. So yes, I think the biosphere is explained, and Richard, no doubt, can tell us without reference to God,

and we've come quite a long way, especially in the last 50 years. I think it's worth raising this, though, because there's a great agreement. A lot of people, quite enough people, want to know why the why question exists. Why do we ask why? Now, I've heard Richard Dawkins speak extremely eloquently on this, and let's talk about this for a minute or two. I think it is worth addressing why we keep asking where we came from in terms of not accepting that it is something explicable, but the reason is something that's rather mysterious

or as a guiding intelligence or creative intelligence and so on. Do you think that that why question is completely irrelevant? No, I think it's innate. I mean, I think it's just so caught up with human nature. I have no illusions about science. I don't think that if we just have another thousand years of science, it's going to eradicate either our belief in spooky coincidences or at one end of the scale or profound religious experience, the other.

I mean, I think this is how we largely are. So if we largely are like that, and you yourself have taken more and more to take non-science, one has to ask, where does that come from? Where does why come from? See, I think science can't offer us the things that religion can. the constellations of immortal life, moments of ecstatic transcendence, which I think even jumping out of your bath

and shouting eureka, which doesn't happen to us all, even that can't grant us. I don't think we'll ever be doing without it. I mean, I think personally I can, but I mean, I'm talking as, you know, for most of us or lots of us, it'll always be there.

And that sense that there is a mystery beyond which we cannot penetrate, I think, is spread right across cultures. Of course you could argue if Archimedes did jump out of his bath and say Eureka, it was because he discovered a principle of science. Yes. Whether he had that kind of total moment of transcendence that religious ecstasy is meant to bring, I don't know. Now, you've said a great deal about this, but I think it is worth discussing, particularly in the context of this book, where you're unweaving the rainbow,

where people like to say, gosh, that's something in inverted commas, or not in inverted come as God given. Do you think the Y question is something that need not be asked? And do you think, if I can just push it at one stage further, the soul is something which cannot be discussed with any sense of arriving at a decent conclusion? Yes, I think just because a question can be asked, there's no reason why it deserves an answer. There are many questions in that category. But then, so why does the question come from, Richard?

Well, I mean, I think one can give a Darwinian answer to that and say that our brains were made by natural selection to understand just enough to help us to survive. And just as we were talking earlier about the rainbow being just a tiny, narrow fragment of spectrum, and we didn't know about all the rest of the spectrum, we can see the whole way our brain is made by natural selection as limited in this kind of way. And the why question,

particularly giving it a kind of personified humanoid answer, everything must have a purpose, what's a mountain for, what are floods for, what are earthquakes for? we are conditioned by natural selection to ask that question because the world in which our ancestors grew up was a very largely social world in which things happened because people engineered them

things happened because other members of the tribe or members of other tribes caused them to happen. So when there's a natural catastrophe like an earthquake or a drought or a flood, it's natural to say who's to blame, why did it happen, who did it? And I believe that all of our looking at the universe, the whole of the scientific enterprise

is in a sense limited by the fact that our brains were never designed to understand. We don't understand quantum theory because our brains were designed by natural selection only to understand the movement of large objects on the African plains. But what about you, Ian, where does that leave your... You mentioned transcendence just a few minutes ago.

Where does that leave your transcendence? If I want my moment of transcendence, I go on a long walk and get on top of a mountain. I mean, I think actually contemplating the beauty of the physical world is a source of great joy. And I think as Wilson says in his book, Conciliants, once you've grasped that the universe is not about you, it does set you free in the most extraordinary way. And once you grasp the horrible possibility, horrible for some,

that you only have this tiny crack in time of consciousness against all eternity, this 80 years, if you're lucky, then perhaps the burden on you is to make everything you can of it, of that privilege of consciousness that you've got. So I think there are ways of putting it all back together and to make of your life, to make it rich and possibly even transcendent, without an all-seeing purpose-giving God.

Yes, and there's a whole part of Bridget Dawkins' book, which we haven't got on to, attacking Gaia, and showing that this presumed organic rainforest or planet is not working for each other, but is working separately, not working separately, not just working to exist and to keep existing. And yet there's something comes at the end.

Is there something that comes at the end of that? Can that be just an accident there? Do you mean the idea that the world itself is working for? Well, you're slightly running out of time, but so you take the idea of the planet, being a single organ, the Gaian ocean, and you say, yes, but when you look at the rainforest, it isn't illly moobar tat, everything isn't just working neatly with each other all the time, they're working for themselves, and this is the overspill. The overspill means that other things exist because of,

but there isn't a sense of a gene saying, oh, I'll do a bit extra to help the tree. If you look deeply at the way Darwinism works, then the illusion of the rainforest, working for the good of the rainforest, can arise, but it is an illusion. really going on is that each individual, indeed each gene within each individual, is working for its own good. But the best way to survive is to survive in the context of the other ones who are also trying to survive. And the end result of that, the rainforest, or indeed the whole world, looks a lot like a system that's been set up for the good of that system, but it's an illusion. But it is a kind of metaphor, isn't it? I mean, because all those

organisms actually, part of their environment are other organisms, so the process of natural selection is in part driven by the existence of other organisms which you've That's a good metaphor, but it becomes a bad metaphor when the whole is seen to be working for the good of the whole. I'm afraid we have to come to a close. I had even got to the brain, which I still think it's extraordinary that rapid development. But perhaps another time. Thanks Richard Dawkins. His book is Unweaving the Rainbow, just been published, and Ian McKeown is author of Enduring Love in Amsterdam. And thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find Find hundreds of other programs about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk

forward slash radio four.