Viswanathan K's Thoughts

I knew Edgar Allan Poe to be a writer. But I didn’t know he even wrote sonnets. The lines from one of his sonnets even became famous! Calling science a “cold philosophy”, his sonnet feared science would “conquer all mysteries by rule and line” and “unweave a rainbow”. Richard Dawkins used that phrase as the title of one of his books, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder . He argued that just as some felt that poetry and art exalted them to new levels, so did science for another set of people: “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.” Richard Feynman made the same point in a BBC interview. He talked about an artist friend of his who said when looking at a beautiful flower “you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing”.    Feynman disagreed: ...

In school, I hated biology. And yet, years later, I absolutely loved The Selfish Gene , Richard Dawkins’ masterpiece. I realized the ultimate proof of how well someone explains things is if, after hearing the explanation, you come away feeling, “How could I have missed that? It’s so obvious!” What I hadn’t realized was that Dawkins’ book wasn’t just appreciated by laymen like me. As Matt Ridley put it : “Books that achieve both — changing science and reaching the public — are rare. Charles Darwin's  On the Origin of Species  (1859) was one.  The Selfish Gene  by Richard Dawkins is another.” And here I had thought that most of the book was just explaining the theories that had already been accepted! But no, points out Ridley. In the third chapter, Dawkins mentioned the then unexplained “problem” of excess DNA: most species had way too much DNA then they needed. Dawkins’ hypothesis for that? “From the point of view of the selfish genes themselves there i...