His starting point is John Keats's well-known, light-hearted accusation that Isaac Newton destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by 'reducing it to the prismatic colours.

We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?"

This chapter describes a third reason to embrace science (the first two being beauty and duty): improving one's performance in the arts.

Science is often presented publicly in a translated format, "dumbed down" to fit the language and existing ideas of non-scientists.

The successful communication of unadulterated science enhances, not confuses, the arts; after all, poets (Dawkins's synonym for artists—see page 24) and scientists are motivated by a similar spirit of wonder.

(For evidence, the rest of this chapter discusses the fascinating science and beautiful new mysteries which followed in the wake of Newton's "unweaving" of the rainbow, e.g. his explanation of the prismatic effects of moist air.)

This chapter offers more evidence that science is fun and poetic, by exploring sound waves, birdsong, and low-frequency phenomena such as pendula and periodic mass extinctions.

This chapter explores what Dawkins considers to be fallacies in astrology, religion, magic, and extraterrestrial visitations.

Although it is useful, some authors take pupillary poetry too far, and, "drunk on metaphor", they produce "bad science"; i.e. postulate faulty theories.

The genes allow one to reconstruct a picture of the range of ways of life that the species has experienced; in this sense DNA would act as a palimpsestic "digital archive" if only its language of encoding history could be fully understood.

Neural circuitry is discussed, and a comparison is made between brains and genes: albeit over different time scales, both record the environment's past to help the organism make the optimal actions in the (predicted) future.

A similar event occurred over a longer time scale (millions of years) when the minds and brains of our ancestors simultaneously improved very rapidly.

Dawkins suggests that when one encounters an extremely unlikely coincidence, it should be considered in the broader context of other, similar events which would also have seemed coincidental.

The first is explained by the fact that the clock had a mechanical defect which made it stop when tilted off the horizontal, which is what a nurse did to read the time of death in poor lighting conditions.