By MEGHAN COX GURDON - WALL STREET JOURNAL
Added: Sun, 02 Oct 2011 11:43:21 UTC

On a warm spring some years ago, I was strolling amid the azalea bushes of the National Arboretum with my eldest daughter, then 12. The place was wild with color, with heaping banks of pink and white and magenta blossoms. My daughter regarded the explosive loveliness with gloom. "Last year, these would have looked like beautiful flowers to me," she said. "Now that I'm taking biology, all I can see is a bunch of plants trying to get pollinated."

Such can be the poetry-killing power of science. In seeking to lay bare the workings of all things, scientific discovery can have the effect of stripping azaleas and other lovely things of their magic. Looked at without romance, an azalea is just a cheap date looking for a bee; a butterfly is a bug with wings; and a rainbow is just an optical illusion.

British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins hopes to persuade children such as my daughter to the contrary—that it is in appreciating hard material certainties that they can experience true poetic magic.

"The facts of the real world as understood through the methods of science," Mr. Dawkins explains in "The Magic of Reality," expose us to "an inspiring beauty which is all the more magical because it is real and because we can understand how it works."

He makes a fine case, too, when he confines himself to the study of the physical world. In chapters that range from natural selection to chemistry to radio waves and tectonic plates, Mr. Dawkins walks readers through complex subjects with verve and lucidity, only rarely venturing so deep that readers over the age of 14 may not want to follow. ("The number of neutrons in an atom's nucleus is less fixed than the number of protons: many elements have different versions, called isotopes, with different numbers of neutrons. For example, there are three isotopes of carbon. . . .")

That young people might come to see poetic magic in the scientific method and the natural world is not, however, sufficient for the author of "The God Delusion," the 2006 best seller. A crusading atheist, Mr. Dawkins has ridden his hobbyhorse into the children's section of the bookstore. There is no doubt that he hopes to relieve young readers of any primitive vestigial religious belief to which they might cling.

Read on

TAGGED: BOOKS, RICHARD DAWKINS