Summary
Preface
It is of little concern whether or not science can prove that the ultimate fate of the cosmos lacks purpose: we live our lives regardless at a "human" level, according to ambitions and perceptions which come more naturally. Therefore, science should not be feared as a sort of cosmological wet blanket. In fact, those in search of beauty or poetry in their cosmology need not turn to the paranormal or even necessarily restrict themselves to the mysterious: science itself, the business of unravelling mysteries, is beautiful and poetic. (The rest of the preface sketches an outline of the book, makes acknowledgements, etc.)
The anaesthetic of familiarity
Opening lines
"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, greater scientists than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?"
Summary
The first chapter describes several ways in which the universe appears beautiful and poetic when viewed scientifically. However, it first introduces an additional reason to embrace science. Time and space are vast, so the probability that the reader came to be alive here and now, as opposed to another time or place, was slim. More important, the probability that the reader came to be alive at all were even slimmer: the correct structure of atoms had to align in the universe. Given how special these circumstances are, the "noble" thing to do is employ the allotted several decades of human life towards understanding that universe. Rather than simply feeling connected with nature, one should rise above this "anaesthetic of familiarity" and observe the universe scientifically.
Drawing room of dukes
This chapter describes a third reason to embrace science (the first two being beauty and duty): improving one's performance in the arts. Science is often presented publicly in a translated format, "dumbed down" to fit the language and existing ideas of non-scientists. This offers a disservice to the public, who are capable of appreciating the beauty of the universe as deeply as a scientist can. The successful communication of unadulterated science enhances, not confuses, the arts; after all, poets (Dawkins's synonym for artists—see page 24) and scientists are motivated by a similar spirit of wonder. We should therefore battle the stereotype that science is difficult, uncool, and not useful for the common person.
Barcodes in the stars
Studying a phenomenon, such as a flower, cannot detract from its beauty. First, some scientists, such as Feynman, are able to appreciate the aesthetics of the flower while engaged in their study. Second, the mysteries which science unfolds lead to new and more exciting mysteries; for example, botany's findings might lead us to wonder about the workings of a fly's consciousness. This effect of multiplying mysteries should satisfy even those who think that scientific understanding is at odds with aesthetics, e.g. people who agree with Einstein that "the most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious". (For evidence, the rest of this chapter discusses the fascinating science and beautiful new mysteries which followed in the wake of Newton's "unweaving" of the rainbow, e.g. his explanation of the prismatic effects of moist air.)
Barcodes at the bar
A fourth reason to embrace science is that it can help deliver justice in a court of law, via DNA fingerprinting or even via simple statistical reasoning. Everyone should learn the scientist's art of probability assessment, to make better decisions.
Unweaving the uncanny
Amazing coincidences are much more common than we may think, and sometimes, when over-interpreted, they lead to faulty conclusions. Statistical significance tests can help determine which patterns are meaningful.
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance
Unlike "magisterial poetry" (where metaphors and pretty language are used to describe the familiar), "pupillary poetry" uses poetic imagery to assist a scientist's thinking about the exotic (e.g. consider "being" an electron temporarily). Although it is useful, some authors take pupillary poetry too far, and, "drunk on metaphor", they produce "bad science"; i.e. postulate faulty theories. This is powered by humanity's natural tendency to look for representations.
The selfish cooperator
Genes compete with each other, but this occurs within the context of collaboration, as is shown with examples involving mitochondria, bacteria, and termites. Two types of collaboration are co-adaptation (tailoring simultaneously the different parts of an organism, such as flower colour and flower markings), and co-evolution (two species changing together; e.g. predator and prey running speeds may increase together in a sort of arms race).
The Genetic Book of the Dead
The body of any organism provides clues about its habitat. The genes allow one to reconstruct a picture of the range of ways of life that the species has experienced; in this sense DNA would act as a palimpsestic "digital archive" if only its language of encoding history could be fully understood. Finally, the curious genetics of cuckoos is discussed.
Reweaving the world
The brain is akin to a powerful computer, which creates a sort of virtual reality to model economically the environment. Neural circuitry is discussed, and a comparison is made between brains and genes: albeit over different time scales, both record the environment's past to help the organism make the optimal actions in the (predicted) future.
The balloon of the mind
The simultaneous explosions in hardware and software of the 20th century are together an example of what Dawkins calls "self-feeding co-evolution". A similar event occurred over a longer time scale (millions of years) when the minds and brains of our ancestors simultaneously improved very rapidly. Five possible triggers of this improvement were: language, map reading, ballistics, memes, and metaphors/analogies.
Conclusion
The final two paragraphs of The balloon of the mind conclude by saying that human beings are the only animal with a sense of purpose in life, and that that purpose should be to construct a comprehensive model of how the universe works.
Petwhac
The book coins the acronymical term, petwhac, short for "Population of Events That Would Have Appeared Coincidental". Dawkins suggests that when one encounters an extremely unlikely coincidence, it should be considered in the broader context of other, similar events which would also have seemed coincidental.
An example would be a person on a foreign holiday encountering a friend they had not seen for years. In isolation this may feel like an impossible coincidence, but considering the wider petwhac (meeting any friend from around the same period, or meeting an acquaintance, or not meeting them but being told weeks later that they had been in the same city at that time) the true odds are more likely. In short, the bigger the petwhac, the stronger case you have to avoid ascribing something to fate or coincidence.
Dawkins offers several examples of petwhacs in the book, two of which are the bedside clock of a woman (Richard Feynman's wife) stopping exactly when she died, and a psychic who stops the watches of his television audience.
The first is explained by the fact that the clock had a mechanical defect which made it stop when tilted off the horizontal, which is what a nurse did to read the time of death in poor lighting conditions. The matter of the watches, in Dawkins's own words, is explained thus —
If somebody's watch stopped three weeks after the spell was cast, even the most credulous would prefer to put it down to chance. We need to decide how large a delay would have been judged by the audience as sufficiently simultaneous with the psychic's announcement to impress. About five minutes is certainly safe, especially since he can keep talking to each caller for a few minutes before the next call ceases to seem roughly simultaneous. There are about 100,000 five-minute periods in a year. The probability that any given watch, say mine, will stop in a designated five-minute period is about 1 in 100,000. Low odds, but there are 10 million people watching the show. If only half of them are wearing watches, we could expect about 25 of those watches to stop in any given minute. If only a quarter of these ring into the studio, that is 6 calls, more than enough to dumbfound a naïve audience. Especially when you add in the calls from people whose watches stopped the day before, people whose watches didn't stop but whose grandfather clocks did, people who died of heart attacks and their bereaved relatives phoned in to say that their 'ticker' gave out, and so on.
John Keats was an English poet of the second generation of Romantic poets, along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. His poems had been in publication for less than four years when he died of tuberculosis at the age of 25. They were indifferently received in his lifetime, but his fame grew rapidly after his death. By the end of the century, he was placed in the canon of English literature, strongly influencing many writers of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; the Encyclopædia Britannica of 1888 called one ode "one of the final masterpieces". Jorge Luis Borges named his first time reading Keats an experience he felt all his life. Keats had a style "heavily loaded with sensualities", notably in the series of odes. Typically of the Romantics, he accentuated extreme emotion through natural imagery. Today his poems and letters remain among the most popular and analysed in English literature – in particular "Ode to a Nightingale", "Ode on a Grecian Urn", "Sleep and Poetry" and the sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer".
Richard Dawkins is a British evolutionary biologist and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was Professor for Public Understanding of Science in the University of Oxford from 1995 to 2008. His 1976 book The Selfish Gene popularised the gene-centred view of evolution, as well as coining the term meme. Dawkins has won several academic and writing awards.
The teleological argument is an argument for the existence of God or, more generally, that complex functionality in the natural world which looks designed is evidence of an intelligent creator.
The Selfish Gene is a 1976 book on evolution by the ethologist Richard Dawkins, in which the author builds upon the principal theory of George C. Williams's Adaptation and Natural Selection (1966). Dawkins uses the term "selfish gene" as a way of expressing the gene-centred view of evolution, popularising ideas developed during the 1960s by W. D. Hamilton and others. From the gene-centred view, it follows that the more two individuals are genetically related, the more sense it makes for them to behave cooperatively with each other.
A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love is a 2003 book of selected essays and other writings by Richard Dawkins. Published five years after Dawkins's previous book Unweaving the Rainbow, it contains essays covering subjects including pseudoscience, genetic determinism, memetics, terrorism, religion and creationism. A section of the book is devoted to Dawkins' late adversary Stephen Jay Gould.
"Ode on a Grecian Urn" is a poem written by the English Romantic poet John Keats in May 1819, first published anonymously in Annals of the Fine Arts for 1819.
"Lamia" is a narrative poem written by the English poet John Keats, which first appeared in the volume Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St Agnes and Other Poems, published in July 1820. The poem was written in 1819, during the famously productive period that produced his 1819 odes. It was composed soon after his La belle dame sans merci and his odes on Melancholy, on Indolence, on a Grecian Urn and to a Nightingale and just before To Autumn.
The watchmaker analogy or watchmaker argument is a teleological argument used to argue for the pseudoscientific concept of intelligent design. The analogy states that a design implies a designer, by an intelligent designer, i.e. a creator deity. The watchmaker analogy was given by William Paley in his 1802 book Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity. The original analogy played a prominent role in natural theology and the "argument from design," where it was used to support arguments for the existence of God of the universe, in both Christianity and Deism. Prior to Paley, however, Sir Isaac Newton, René Descartes, and others from the time of the scientific revolution had each believed "that the physical laws he [each] had uncovered revealed the mechanical perfection of the workings of the universe to be akin to a watch, wherein the watchmaker is God."
The God Delusion is a 2006 book by British evolutionary biologist and ethologist Richard Dawkins, a professorial fellow at New College, Oxford and, at the time of publication, the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford.
The junkyard tornado, sometimes known as Hoyle's fallacy, is an argument against abiogenesis, using a calculation of its probability based on false assumptions, as comparable to "the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747". It was used originally by English astronomer Fred Hoyle (1915–2001), who tried to apply statistics to evolution and the origin of life, but similar observations predate Hoyle and have been found all the way back to Darwin's time, and indeed to Cicero in classical antiquity. While Hoyle himself was an atheist, the argument has since become a mainstay in the rejection of evolution by religious groups.
The Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit is a counter-argument to modern versions of the argument from design for the existence of God. It was introduced by Richard Dawkins in chapter 4 of his 2006 book The God Delusion, "Why there almost certainly is no God".
19th-century science was greatly influenced by Romanticism, an intellectual movement that originated in Western Europe as a counter-movement to the late-18th-century Enlightenment. Romanticism incorporated many fields of study, including politics, the arts, and the humanities.
Growing Up in the Universe was a series of lectures given by Richard Dawkins as part of the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, in which he discussed the evolution of life in the universe.
The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry is a 1947 collection of essays by Cleanth Brooks. It is considered a seminal text in the New Critical school of literary criticism. The title contains an allusion to the fourth stanza of John Donne's poem, "The Canonization", which is the primary subject of the first chapter of the book.
The Phenomenon of Man is an essay by the French geologist, paleontologist, philosopher, and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. In this work, Teilhard describes evolution as a process that leads to increasing complexity, culminating in the unification of consciousness. The text was written in the 1930s, but it achieved publication only posthumously, in 1955.
The Simonyi Professorship for the Public Understanding of Science is a chair at the University of Oxford. The chair was established in 1995 for the ethologist Richard Dawkins by an endowment from Charles Simonyi. The aim of the Professorship is 'to communicate science to the public without, in doing so, losing those elements of scholarship which constitute the essence of true understanding'. It is a position that had been endowed by Charles Simonyi with the express intention that the holder "be expected to make important contributions to the public understanding of some scientific field", and that its first holder should be Richard Dawkins.
Non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA) is the view, advocated by paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, that science and religion each represent different areas of inquiry, fact vs. values, so there is a difference between the "nets" over which they have "a legitimate magisterium, or domain of teaching authority", and the two domains do not overlap. He suggests, with examples, that "NOMA enjoys strong and fully explicit support, even from the primary cultural stereotypes of hard-line traditionalism" and that it is "a sound position of general consensus, established by long struggle among people of goodwill in both magisteria." Some have criticized the idea or suggested limitations to it, and there continues to be disagreement over where the boundaries between the two magisteria should be.
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science is a 2008 popular biography book about the history of science written by Richard Holmes. In it, the author describes the scientific discoveries of the polymaths of the late eighteenth century and how this period formed the basis for modern scientific discoveries. Holmes, a literary biographer, also looks at the influence of science on the arts in the Romantic era. The book won the 2009 Royal Society Prize for Science Books, the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction, and the 2010 National Academies Communication Award.
The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True is a 2011 book by the British biologist Richard Dawkins, with illustrations by Dave McKean. The book was released on 15 September 2011 in the United Kingdom, and on 4 October 2011 in the United States.
The rainbow has been a favorite component of art and religion throughout history.
