The title of "Unweaving the Rainbow" by Richard Dawkins was inspired by the poet John Keats, who once railed with drinking pals Charles Lamb and William Wordsworth that science had destroyed poetry by "unweaving the rainbow."
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"We are survival machines--robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment."
"Anyone would think I was the only atheist around...."
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Richard Dawkins was born in Nairobi, Kenya and studied at Oxford University, graduating in 1962. He became assistant professor of zoology at the University of California at Berkeley in 1967, and then returned to Oxford, where he held academic posts beginning in 1975. Dawkins is best known for popularizing the theories of sociobiology--the study of social behavior in human beings and animals--in the context of evolution, in his book "The Selfish Gene" (1976).
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1941 Nairobi, Kenya, East Africa,
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I love this view of evolution, an array of simple systems producing complex results really appeals to the programmer in me.