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Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion & the Appetite for Wonder A L S O__T O D A Y 21st Log For Net stocks, "irrational exuberance" is old hat - - - - - - - - - - T A B L E__T A L K Discuss the programs you can't function without and why in the Digital Culture area of Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Let's Get This Straight By Scott Rosenberg Yes, there is a better search engine. While the portal sites fiddle, Google catches fire (12/21/98) Microsoft on Microsoft By Karlin Lillington How does the software giant spin its own history in its reference products? (12/18/98) Pod people By Janelle Brown Peapod, the online grocery service, sounds great -- but can it deliver? (12/17/98) Boon or boondoggle? By Nicholas Confessore The E-Rate subsidizes Net access for schools and libraries -- and your telephone company wants to kill it (12/16/98) Let's Get This Straight By Scott Rosenberg Bill Gates and Bill Clinton -- prisoners of Lawyer World (12/15/98) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE 21ST BOOKS ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - S A L O N E M P O R I U M FREE! 12-ounce bag of Salon Blend with a purchase of $30 or more. While supplies last.

THE SCIENCE OF SELFISHNESS | PAGE 1, 2 - - - - - - - - - - It's not as if Dawkins can't do better than this. Frequently, he has. "The Extended Phenotype" and even "The Selfish Gene" contain much more subtle discussions of the ways in which "selfish" genes cause altruistic behavior and feelings. What these come down to, however, is a single uncomfortable fact: "Selfish," when applied to genes, doesn't mean "selfish" at all. It means, instead, an extremely important quality for which there is no good word in the English language: "the quality of being copied by a Darwinian selection process." This is a complicated mouthful. There ought to be a better, shorter word -- but "selfish" isn't it. If what Dawkins meant by his angry protest about rocks and rain clouds was, "There is no more connection between selfishness in a human and selectibility in a gene than there is between a rock and a rain cloud," then this may be true, but it's not what he said. And you'd have thought that a man aspiring to the condition of "poetic science" should attend to the plain sense of the words he actually uses. When he does so, however, it is often to deny them. "Of course," Dawkins writes, "the personification of the gene is not to be taken literally ... Personification is sometimes a useful device, and for critics to accuse us of taking it literally is almost as stupid as taking it literally in the first place. Physicists are not literally charmed by their particles and the critic who would so accuse them is a tiresome pedant." But there are important differences between the "charm" of quarks and the "selfishness" of genes. In this context, the important one is that the charm of quarks is measurable and (indirectly) observable. To know its charm tells us something about a particular quark, whereas the "selfishness" of genes is a matter of definition: All genes have it to exactly the same extent. To say that a gene is "selfish" tells us nothing except that it is a gene. To call science "poetic," on the other hand, seems to mean nothing except that it employs metaphors and rhetoric to illustrate its point. I can't see that anyone could object to this, even if, in most sciences, the point to be illustrated must remain resolutely mathematical. Indeed, in earlier books, Dawkins has used these techniques wonderfully. Think of his discussion of bats in "The Blind Watchmaker" or spider webs in "Climbing Mount Improbable." But there are two difficulties with this kind of writing. The first is to decide between good and bad use of metaphor: The rule of thumb employed in "Unweaving the Rainbow" is that when metaphors are deployed by friends and admirers they are "good poetic science," but when they are deployed by Stephen Jay Gould they are bad. (The nastiness between Gould and his friends on the one hand and Dawkins and his friends on the other deserves a book in itself -- and in fact, I've just finished writing one. "Unweaving the Rainbow" will do nothing to diminish it.) I don't want to end on a note of nastiness -- there are good things in this book. The discussion of the physics of the rainbow is delightful. So are the two chapters on statistics and the paranormal. Nonetheless, the discriminating reader should leave this volume alone and follow the example of Susan Blackmore (whose upcoming book on memes gets a generous plug from Dawkins): Buy "The Extended Phenotype," and read it twice. SALON | Dec. 22, 1998 Andrew Brown is writing "The Darwin Wars: How Stupid Genes Became Selfish Gods," which will be published next spring in London by Simon & Schuster.