Books Do Furnish a Life: Reading and Writing Science

by Richard Dawkins

‘The’ literature, for a scientist, is all those papers, often abstrusely and densely written, which pertain to a particular research topic.

By ‘the literature of science’ in this essay, I mean something closer to the ‘a’ definition from the OED above. I am talking about science as literature, good writing on the theme of science. This usually means books rather than scientific journals.

As an aside, I think that’s a pity. There’s no obvious reason why a scientific paper shouldn’t be gripping and entertaining. No reason why scientists shouldn’t enjoy the articles it is their professional duty to read.

During my spell as editor of the journal Animal Behaviour I tried to encourage authors to forsake not only the self-effacing scientific passive (‘A different approach will be taken by the present author’) but also the traditional and dreary ‘Introduction, Me...

Science doesn’t need languaging-up to make it poetic. The poetry is in the subject matter: reality. It needs only clarity and honesty to convey it to the reader and, with a little extra effort, to deliver that authentic tingling up the spine which is sometimes thought the prerogative of art, music, poetry, ‘great’ literature in the conventional sense.

Books have always been an important part of my life. Unlike many biologists I came to my subject not through a love of birds or natural history in the wild (that came later) but through books and a preoccupation with the deep philosophical questions of existence.

Why do we enjoy fiction? What is the fascination of stories about non-existent people and things that never happened, and why do we turn to them for light relief after reading about things that did?

H. G. Wells did it both ways: prophetic fiction such as The Time Machine; and non-fictional speculation in his remarkable (and to modern readers deplorable in parts) Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought.

if you call somebody an idiot you’re not going to change his mind, and that’s possibly true, but you may change the minds of a thousand people listening in and so I’m less inhibited about calling him an idiot.

when I taught in college, it was at a time when you had those transparencies that you could write on, or you could pre-prepare them, and some professors would just slap down a fully prepared transparency and there were all the notes, and they would speak to the notes. RD: As opposed to building it up. NDT: As opposed to building it up. And I’d say, ‘No! If you do that, they’ll just copy!’ Whereas if you draw the first part of the diagram – here’s an axis of temperature, and here’s time, and here’s – and then you assemble the ideas together and you get a far deeper understanding of what’s going on. RD: That’s a very good didactic point for actually teaching.

A few scientists cheat, changing numbers or inventing experiments that never happened, in the service of a cherished hypothesis. What is significant about these cases is not their existence but the unmitigated horror with which they are regarded by the scientific community. If a gardener asks us to pay him in used fivers, we wink knowingly and don’t tell the tax man. If a friend Joads the railway,fn2 travelling without a ticket, we are less indulgent but still don’t expose him. But a scientist proved to have fabricated a data point would be banished unlamented from his profession without a second chance. Admittedly, precisely because scientific cheating is such a heinous disgrace, professors tend to close ranks about a colleague so accused, and put would-be whistle-blowers through distressing hoops to substantiate their case. But all scientists at least pay lip service to the view that a proven cheat must not practise as a scientist ever again and must presumably retrain in the law or some other profession more suited to his talents.

The real population of the world at the time of Julius Caesar was only a few million, and all of us, all seven billion of us, are descended from them. We are indeed all related.

People are afraid of the dark. Science, as Sagan argued and personally exemplified, has the power to reduce ignorance and dispel fear. We should all read science and learn to think like scientists, not because science is useful (though it is), but because the light of knowledge is wonderful and banishes the debilitating and time-wasting fear of the dark.

American science leads the world, but so does American anti-science.

It is bafflingly paradoxical that the United States is by far the world’s leading scientific nation while simultaneously housing the most scientifically illiterate populace outside the Third World.

I have not the slightest memory of whether we had a lecture on the water-vascular system of starfish. Probably we did, but I am happy to say that the fact had no bearing upon my tutor’s decision to assign an essay on the topic. The starfish water-vascular system is one of many highly specialized topics in zoology that I now recall for the same reason – that I wrote an essay on them.

Michael Crichton’s Timeline is science fiction in the sense that the heroes have the technology to travel in time, but when they get to the middle ages the story becomes an ordinary thriller, albeit a good one, which might as well be set in the present.

The Black Cloud is, in my opinion, one of the greatest works of science fiction ever written, up there with the best of Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke.

the real virtue of The Black Cloud is this. Without ever preaching at us, Hoyle manages, as the story races along, to teach us some fascinating science along the way: not just scientific facts, but important scientific principles. We get to see how scientists work and how they think. We are even uplifted and inspired.

Henry Moore’s The Knife Edge, to tell us: The hand is the cutting edge of the mind. Civilisation is not a collection of finished artefacts, it is the elaboration of processes. In the end, the march of man is the refinement of the hand in action. The most powerful drive in the ascent of man is his pleasure in his own skill. He loves to do what he does well and, having done it well, he loves to do it better.

There is magic – the right kind of magic – in science. There is poetry too, and magical poetry on every page of this book. Science is the poetry of reality.

I feel I have a mission to persuade my scientific colleagues to write their science as if they had a lay person looking over their shoulder, not to write in a language which is completely opaque to other people. I believe they’ll do better science if they do that, I think they’ll communicate with other scientists better if they do that. I even think they’ll understand better the science that they themselves are doing.

I now think that the book I am most proud of, as a book for lay people, is Climbing Mount Improbable. But as a contribution to knowledge I am most proud of The Extended Phenotype. It was my second book and it was, as you might guess from its title, not primarily aimed at lay people, though a lot of lay people have read it. It’s aimed at my professional colleagues, and I’m most proud of it because the idea goes beyond what others had already done.

In spite of its title, his great book is less on the origin of species than on the origin of adaptation. That is to say, it is on the origin of the design illusion, that powerful simulacrum that led people to suspect, wrongly, that material causes are not enough to explain biology.

Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species

Species become adapted to their community, not just to a particular physical region and climate. They become adapted to each other. The other species of the community are an important – perhaps the most important – feature of the environment to which each species becomes adapted. The harmonious role-playing of species in a community, then, resembles the harmony of the parts of a single individual organism. The resemblance is deceptive and must be treated with caution. Yet it is not completely without foundation.

A well-adapted animal reflects, in minute detail even down to the biochemical, the environments in which its ancestors survived. A gene pool is carved and whittled through generations of ancestral natural selection to fit that environment. In theory a knowledgeable zoologist, presented with the complete transcript of a genome, should be able to reconstruct the environmental circumstances that did the carving.fn2 In this sense the DNA is a coded description of ancestral environments, a ‘genetic book of the dead’. The extinction of a species therefore diminishes us in a sense that the death of an individual perhaps does not. To be sure, every individual is unique, and to that extent irreplaceable. But the set of genes in a species’ gene pool represents a unique solution to the problem of survival. An individual organism, by contrast, is only a permutation of the units of that solution: unique, but not unique in an interesting way. If an individual dies, there are lots more where it came from. It is just another deal from the same pack of cards. When the last individual of a species dies, the whole pack has been destroyed.

When I was first approached to take part in Inside Nature’s Giants, I immediately suggested that, if they ever had the opportunity to dissect a giraffe, they should try to hunt for an extraordinary bit of anatomy called the left recurrent laryngeal nerve. If you were designing a nerve connecting the brain to the voicebox, would you send it on a detour down into the chest to loop around one of the large arteries there, and then back up to its target organ at the top of the neck? Of course not. Yet that is exactly what the recurrent laryngeal nerve does, not because it has other business with branches in the chest – it doesn’t. The detour makes perfect sense as a relic of evolutionary history and our fishy ancestry, but from a design point of view in a mammal it is a botched job, pure and simple: no self-respecting engineer would perpetrate such a thing. It’s bad enough in humans, but in a giraffe … that I had to see!

The overwhelming impression I get from surveying internal anatomy is that it is a beautifully honed mess! Every organ and structure has a function, but this has evolved gradually and sometimes imperfectly, with vestigial weaknesses reflecting the unimaginably long journey of the animal’s DNA through geological deep time. From sea to land, from deserts to jungles, from shredding leaves to slaughtering wildebeest, the anatomies of animals tell us not only what they do now, but what their ancestors did in the past.