Having characterized the gene as relentlessly selfish, and assured the world that gods are dangerous delusions, Richard Dawkins now wants to help young readers understand why natural phenomena are magical.
Not in the sense that they can be explained by fanciful malarkey—rainbows are not the gods’ bridge to earth; runs of “bad luck” are not natural phenomena that choose victims; and natural cataclysms are not God’s mortification of man, contrary to at least one presidential candidate’s claims.
In The Magic of Reality: How We Know What’s Really True, due out next month from the Free Press, the renowned evolutionary biologist writes that while magical explanations of natural phenomena are twaddle, the laws of science and reason can be “magical": that is, “deeply moving, exhilarating: something that gives us goose bumps, something that makes us feel more fully alive.”
In that spirit, Dawkins explains such phenomena as the composition of matter, the age of the universe, and the great variety of plants and animals. And how rainbows come to be. And why runs of supposed bad luck contravene the law of averages.
To advocate for that scientific rationalism, Dawkins, who is noted for his doggedly sane prose, makes use of an unexpected rhetorical device: the comic book.
Famous for The Selfish Gene (1976) and infamous for The God Delusion (2006), Dawkins joins forces this time around with an illustrator, Dave McKean. The comic-book artist reinforces the author’s arguments with large, expressive drawings—tiny creatures rendered huge, heroes and gods and mythical figures, prehistoric monsters.
Like many modern comic and graphic books, The Magic of Reality is not just for children, Dawkins says by phone from London. “It works for children, but it works for adults as well, and for adults reading or choosing books for their children.”
While far heavier with text than most graphic books, The Magic of Reality nonetheless marks Dawkins’s entree into a growing band of scientists and science writers who are making use of the comic-book format—one that can “give accurate information and make it exciting,” as he puts it.
Graphic treatments of academic subjects are not new. On the shelves of any large bookstore sit versions of, and guides to, The Canterbury Tales, The Divine Comedy, Che Guevara, and much else.
Graphic books on science are plentiful, too. Most are “dummies” guides, several in Japanese manga style, to such topics as molecular biology, string theory, and brain science.
But more-sophisticated versions are beginning to edge onto the shelves—the likes of the acclaimed Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species: A Graphic Adaptation, by Michael Keller and the illustrator Nicolle Rager Fuller (Rodale, 2009) and Feynman (First Second Press), by Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick, released in August.
The latter, about the Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman, earned a glowing review in The New York Review of Books from the mathematician and physicist Freeman Dyson: “the best example of this genre that I have yet seen.”
Even an academic press has joined in the trend. This year Columbia University Press published DNA: A Graphic Guide to the Molecule That Shook the World, by Israel Rosenfield, Edward Ziff, and Borin Van Loon.
Ziff is a professor of biochemistry and neural science at New York University. Rosenfield, a professor of history at the City University of New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, has a medical degree and an eclectic publications record, which includes books on memory, consciousness, and brain science, as well as a satirical novel, Freud’s Megalomania (Norton, 2000).
Columbia asked Ziff and Rosenfield not only to update their DNA for Beginners (Writers & Readers, 1983), but to make it wacky with the help of Van Loon, a London-based artist who worked on the 1983 precursor and has designed and illustrated documentary comic books on such subjects as Darwin, Marx, the Buddha, and literary theory.
Van Loon is also a veteran of 1970s underground comics, and the disruptive spirit of early extended-form comic-book publishing that he brings to DNA also enlivens Jay Hosler’s Evolution: The Story of Life on Earth, just out from Hill and Wang. Illustrated by Kevin Cannon and Zander Cannon, its frames brim with information and wit. Hosler, an entomologist and an associate professor of biology at Juniata College, says his approach draws from his childhood: “I grew up watching ‘Looney Tunes’ with my dad. He would laugh at some things, I would laugh at some things. I wouldn’t get some of the stuff, but there was enough there for me to hold onto that I could enjoy the experience.”
Because narratives aided that process, he tries to embed stories into his comic-book science, so that “even if you encounter some stuff that you don’t quite get, the comic continues to move, and you continue to want to move with it.”
He believes prospects are improving for science comics. In 1998, when he wrote Clan Apis, his “biography of a honeybee,” now going into its sixth edition, “no publisher had any desire to publish it,” he says. Only a grant permitted it to move forward—fittingly, one from the Xeric Foundation, set up by Peter Laird, creator of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Van Loon, illustrator of DNA, is not so sanguine. Publishers’ appetite for academic comic books is dulled “because some people take against them, usually academics who don’t like giving bites of information, which is what we really need to concentrate on in a documentary comic-book format.”
Hosler wonders why academics would oppose books that encourage interest in science and make use of illustrations, just as science textbooks frequently do.
Rosenfield agrees. “A lot of that is phony snobbery,” he says. He thinks scientists are less prone to it than colleagues in the arts and sciences: “Scientists are very amused by these kinds of illustrations. And some of them are very good explanations of the material.”
When it came to considering Ziff and Rosenfield’s DNA, some members of the Columbia press’s faculty review committee paused at the idea of publishing a comic book, says Patrick Fitzgerald, publisher in the sciences at the press. But arguments like Rosenfield’s won them over: “They were assured that, while it looks very cheeky and off the radar screen, we would adhere to scholarly publishing standards, that we would get reviews of it, and that it wouldn’t be a DNA-for-dummies sort of book.”
The famously skeptical Dawkins says he never considered emulating the sparse-text approach of a full-blown graphic book—"then it wouldn’t have been my book at all.” Replete though The Magic of Reality is with splashy illustrations, he thinks its text can work alone, and he says it may do so in a British paperback edition.
Will young readers find the book cool enough to bother with? Dawkins says he has found that they do. To help the book’s prospects, the Free Press enlisted, as one blurbist, the comedian Ricky Gervais, creator of The Office television series: “I wanted to write this book, but I wasn’t clever enough. Now I’ve read it, I am.” Gervais hardly has much cred among teenagers, but his blurb may win classroom adoptions among their teachers.
