Rating: 
Summary: Vintage Dawkins
Review: If you have read the reviews of Unweaving The Rainbow, Richard Dawkin's most recent book, as published in several large newspapers you could be excused for thinking this book to be less worthy than his previous offerings. Not so. In some ways this is his best work to date and as far as his critics are concerned, it could be said to be too good. There are really two stories in this book which divide roughly into the first and second half. The first half concerns science and its role in modern culture. It is this story that has so annoyed many of the literary and media worlds and has prompted some extraordinary vicious personal attacks against Dawkins (one cannot avoid noting that these critics were unable to mount a single scientific argument). Dawkins lays waste to literary pretensions and notions of cultural superiority. But Dawkins also criticizes science and coins the new terms of bad poetic science and good poetic science. Dawkins believes it is good poetic science that guides our way to C.P. Snow's Third Culture.In the last four chapters Dawkins switches back to his ground of evolutionary biology and it is vintage Dawkins. (If one wanted to quibble it could be said that the book is somewhat uneven in assumed knowledge and complexity, but as I say, this is a quibble). It is all there; the radical yet carefully argued new ideas, together with new ways of appreciating the expanatory power of natural selection when seen as operating through minimal replicators, be they genes or memes. The chapters on our virtual reality software functioning as part of the environment in genes and memes are selected is original and important. A superb book from our Darwin.
Rating: 
Summary: Like a clumsy oaf treading on a wild flower
Review: As a scientist myself, I looked forward to another great book from one of the masters of scientific explanation, Richard Dawkins. However, what I was treated to was more a collection of unconnected essays, some good, some attrocious and most having the irritating feature of prose smattered with poetic quotes, presumably intended to give the text an added boost. I was particularly shocked to see Dawkins's murderous and wanton mutilation and debasement of Keat's "Ode to a Nightingale". Like a clumsy oaf treading on a wild flower, Dawkins proceeds to try and explain and add to this great poem by tacking on some interesting but utterly irrelevant scientific details about birds. The very fact that he felt he needed to do this, suggests strongly to me that he has not understood this poem at all, nor poetry in general for that matter. Poetry conveys emotional content, allowing one human being (perhaps centuries dead) to cause another to laugh or cry or sing. This channel of communication is totally orthogonal to lucid metaphor and imagery used to explain scientific facts and concepts, which Dawkins invokes with great effect in his earlier and far superior books such as "The selfish gene". He should definitely stick to what he is good at. Dawkins redeems himself somewhat when he devotes some book space to giving a vitriolic and righteous good kicking to a new branch of feminism which demeans and debauches both true feminism and true science by seeking to replace reason, science and common sense with "women's ways of knowing". (If scientific enquiry were left up to this bunch, humanity would be in deep trouble!) However Dawkins then sinks to new depths when his inflated ego cannot resist the urge to take another swipe at Stephen Jay Gould. On the sidelines, we are supposed to cheer loudly as these two Herculean gladiator heroes knock each other's tiny straw men to the floor with their big swords. Well, er, no actually...it makes them both look rather silly. The last two chapters are probably the best, giving a very nice outline of the evolution of human intelligence, however, overall this is a rather poor effort, with Dawkins clearly riding on his reputation to enable him to broadcast to a much wider audience than he would otherwise reach if this book were his first effort. Don't bother buying this book unless you are truly a rabid disciple of Dawkins. (Only high priests and priestesses of the Dawkins cult need place it on their altars!)
Rating:
Summary: An awe-inspiring illumination of scientific and poetic awe
Review: While I am sure there will be detractors to Dawkins's premise that science affords us ample opportunities to engage our sense of wonder, his treatment of the topic makes them seem petty in their criticisms. They need to see that this is not a book born out of religious or political motivations. Rather it is simply a testament to the magnificence and mind-expanding world of reality as only science can show it to us. Those who find it offensive because it doesn't pay sufficient homage to their notions of deity are missing the point. I fear that such critics may exhaust their days, like Plato's prisoners, studying nothing but the shadows on the wall of their small and peculiar cave.
Rating: 
Summary: Dawkins' lyrical science demystification most worthwhile.
Review: This most general of Dawkins' books exploits his gift for translating the most complex of scientific ideas into language that is not merely accessable to the general reader, but is also a joy to read. Along the way he touches on some of the key personality/ideology conflicts that continue to dog the sciences. This brief work is not an anti-religious screed, as some have alleged. It is a dispassionate, fact-based discussion of how some of science's biggest questions are framed, analyzed and decided. In sum, it is an overview. Those interested in Dawkins' specialty, the inter-relationship between genetics and evolution, should read his earlier "River out of Eden" and "Blind Watchmaker".
Rating:
Summary: Imaginative and intersting views on life through science
Review: I have read all of this authors books, this is perhaps his finest. Criticisms have been levelled at his stark view of a Godless world. This book in some ways answers these criticisms. I found the truths revealed in his previous books liberating anyway. I am no scientist, but neither am I an idiot, and the author savages beautifully the idiots (astrologers, religious) that blind so many the real beauty of or worlds.
Rating:
Summary: A good read in popular science
Review: Dawkins is our best popularizer of science, and this is one of his better books. I found the much-deserved attack on Stephen J. Gould the yummiest part, long long overdue. Stephen J. Gould is a gifted writer whose ideas are so confused that evolutionary biologists pay no attention at all to him, while here in America many high-brow folks think he is the Pope of Evolution himself.
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Summary: A brillant scientist creating beautiful literature!
Review: A sample of Dawkins' poetry:...."the minors's son, might have turned fresh eyes on his coal fire, whose glowing energy last saw the light of day--was the light of day--when it warmned the Carboniferous treeferns, to be laid down in earth's dark cellar and sealed for three million centuries." If only artists could appreciate science the way our top scientists (Dawkins, Pinker, Sagen) wax poetic! But this book is more than lyric writing; it is full of insights and connections and clarity of thought. His images are so compelling, I intend to use Dawkins' discussion of statistics and coincidence in my high school math classes. This is a wonderful book!
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Summary: A poor attempt at overlaying beauty with science
Review: Having treated us to a theory of probability in his previous book in which Dawkins feels he has discovered some great all-explaining theory of the universe, thereby removing all necessity of religion or anything noumenal, he must surely have been aware of the great gaping hole this theory left, and in this book attempts to fill it with a rather tawdry and lack-lustre conception of what aesthetics means to him and then proceeds to try and persuade others to his religion of atheism by attempting to steal the thunder from poetry by picking on soft targets like Keats, who according to Dawkins did not understand how much more truly wonderful reality was without a creator or the necessity of one, pointing at such examples as the refraction of light to bolster his own sense of the fabulous. It is a book written in the spirit of a kind of ironic dogma that springs from a dislike of faith which he regards as a disease. Consequently, it is of no great moment, being a defence of a point of view he is entitled to, yet given his position, one should perhaps be slightly amused that he believes his views to be the official scientific line. There are many poets who have been scientists and great observers of nature, and it is clear that Dawkins has read none of them. There are many scientists who believe reality contains more than science is privy to, and Dawkins keeps silent about them too. In the end, we have a book in which Dawkins attempts to steal the thunder from areas of concern about which he knows nothing other than what his sacred probability theory allows him to know, tries to apply it to a perspective involving patterns, and inevitably fails. With so many accolades that the market philosophy has thrown at it, it is unlikely that he will ever realise the new depths of failure that this book has reached. Science has much to offer, but anyone looking for it will not find it here.
Rating: 
Summary: Unravelling Dawkins To A Single Thread......
Review: Dawkins isn't a bad writer, but this book, like Carl Sagan's 'Demon Haunted World', is another tract in that would-be genre of *The public need rescuing from their own foolishness, and we, The Scientists, are the ones to do it* variety. Of course, you will not find it saying so in so many words, pleading as it does for the common man to see the *poetry* in science and in purely natural phenomena, instead of falling for the superstitions of the paranormal and the mythological. Ah, but here is where the problems start! What science is MEANT to be about, on the part of anyone who flatters her/himself with the title, is an investigative approach to the universe so cautious that the correct humility required is truly terrifying......and no wonder therefore that individuals like Dawkins are entirely unable to attain it. The issue of how *daft* or *implausible* any given phenomenon is imagined to be in some a priori sense is (in contrast to the usual marmalade-thick praises showered on this author by his apologists) simply irrelevant, and displays a staggering lack of comprehension concerning the most basic philosophical tools and necessities. *Scientific* is not something like a badge or an award to be bestowed upon a certain *subject*, or not so bestowed, as the whim arises (this is one of many egregious errors which the author makes). There are no *scientific* subjects, only a certain open, honest (and above all else HUMBLE) approach to ANY subject. Now, given these observations, Dawkins fails to meet the mark rather catastrophically. A reasonable observation of human history can only drive one to conclude that the phenomena which Dawkins writes off as "superstition" and the human mind *gone astray*, are in fact, and always have been, nothing of the sort, rather they are A VITAL COMPONENT IN THE MAKE UP OF WHAT WE TRULY ARE. This, however, is a conclusion so shattering to everything which materialism holds dear that it simply does not have the necessary courage (let alone maturity) to make it. I believe I can say with my hand on my heart that I have no final, unchangeable *take* on the universe, but as a person who has had devastating personal experience of at least two of the *nonexistent* phenomena Dawkins mentions (and I might add, for those who actually care about the truth, without there being the slightest luxury of doubt) what can I do except throw this book (and with it, the author's claim to be a scientist) at the wall? This is why works with this kind of agenda are ultimately unsatisfactory. If I turn to *science* to elucidate real events in my experience, and I get the standardised Dawkinsonian / Saganesque / Wolpertian dismissive reply, then I feel entirely justified in seeking to choke of any contribution I might be making to the funding of such *science*, and to be vocal about encouraging others to do the same, because it has failed at that most basic level of even ATTEMPTING to explain the world that I am faced with, and makes do with explaining instead a simpler and altogether more convenient one of its own invention. Unfortunately, this is not science, it is fantasy. I am not unique. There are literally thousands of people like me, who can only have the same response when they listen to these derisions, and for those who may retain some speck of interest concerning the issue of why books like UNWEAVING THE RAINBOW fail to change the mind of the public away from its *foolishness*, along with the authors of such books themselves, if they are interested, I have given the reply. Their inability to achieve the result they seek, and (almost perversely) to stir up even more of that which they imagine themselves to be fighting against, will forever appear inexplicable to them and pregnant with menace until these issues are taken seriously. I am sorry, but if you believe anything else, then you should be written into the purple prose of Dawkins' thesis
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Summary: The bias in this book reveals an anti-religion motivation
Review: There is something slightly sinister in Professor Dawkin's claims and the position he is trying to maintain for the status of science. Are we really to believe that science is under attack from all sides, that it is his responsibility to fly the flag of understanding against the onslaught of the flood of unreason? Any rational person can see that science enjoys an ascendancy whose position is quite remarkable historically, matched only by religion prior to the Reformation, and is intimately hooked into every aspect of our lives in the modern world, including the political and economic domains. I see no evidence of bonfires of technological equipment or other equivalent signs of symbolic book-burning. Certainly, there exists a healthy critical spirit which reason demands of us in order to prevent the development of dogma from opinion, but Professor Dawkins would have us believe that we are constantly under siege from powerful odd-ball thinkers that are attempting to lay claim to the status of science. He attacks poets who fail to understand the significance of scientific enquiry and the successes it has led us to, and keeps very quiet about those poets who have and still do extol its virtues which serve to enrich their imagery. Ironically, the image that springs to mind on reading this book is that of an inquisitor strangely similar to a medieval counterpart in quite another field, a field which is paradoxically an anathema to Professor Dawkins, whose views on religion are fairly well known. Yet it is this that is the hidden message that come through. Indeed, the book would be better retitled "Why I Am Not A Christian", since his flow of thought is forever a justification of his atheism, and this colours his perception of a diverse reality in tones of black and white only. Unfortunately, this title has already been used by Bertrand Russell with greater clarity and insight, and with far greater honesty. Philosophically, the book has very little to offer.
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