Climbing Mount Improbable
Climbing Mount Improbable
Richard Dawkins Penguin paperback
Richard Dawkins is a passionate and enthusiastic advocate of the Darwinian theory of Natural Selection. He's best known for his recent broadside against organised – and disorganised – religion in his bestseller, The God Delusion. Dawkins, Darwinism's 'St Paul', uses this book to explain the workings of natural selection.
Dare I say it? Dawkins' sense of wonder and awe at the natural world is almost religious. It's certainly joyous! I was fascinated by his elaborately observed description of the common spider's labours to build her web. Magnificent.
Dawkins argues persuasively for natural selection using the parable of 'Mount Improbable'.He explodes the common myth that evolutionary development is based on random chance. That's an elementary misunderstanding of the theory. “Darwinism is not a theory of random chance. It is a theory of random mutation plus non-random cumulative natural selection.” This is a simple point not often grasped even by those who really ought to know better. Random chance couldn't work. IN Dawkins' parable Darwinism solves the problem of the theory of life by breaking the improbability involved into small manageable parts. Rather than looking at the towering cliffs in front of us we go up the back of the mountain by the gentle slopes 'inch by million-year inch'.
Mutation is the only random aspect of evolutionary development. Selection is non-random, the accumulation of little bits of luck. 'Animals make a living by eating, avoiding being eaten and reproducing'. The changes that allow more animals to survive and go forward tend to remain in their descendants.
Eyes are often cited as a problem for the theory of natural selection. In a wide-ranging chapter, The Forty-fold Path to Enlightenment, Dawkins examines the eyes of a wide variety of species – from scallops, spiders, insects and cats to humans. He explains how small incremental mutations can in computer projection show a good fish eye with a working lens in some 364,000 generations, even assuming that for every 101 animals that survived with each improvement, 100 survived without it. There are some forty different kinds of eyes in the natural world. One species of fish Bathylychnops exilis even has two supplementary eyes for looking downwards. These secondary eyes have a different type of lens than the primary eyes.
Darwin is often cited as saying, “to suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances , for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.” This, however was a rhetorical device He went on to say, “When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round,, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying, Vox Populi, Vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from an imperfect and simple eye to one perfect and complex, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever lightly varies, and the variations be inherited, , as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should ever be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, cannot be considered real.”
The most amazing story in the book is Dawkins' account of the 'enclosed garden' – the fig. The story of how figs are pollinated by very tiny wasps specific to each species of fig tree was mind-blowing in its complexity. The chapter alone is worth the price of the book.
This superb book is a terrific introduction to evolutionary science for anyone to grasp. That's Dawkins' genius. He has the happy knack of jettisoning impenetrable academic language in favour of proper English. He has to be one of the finest science writers around today.
Richard Dawkins Penguin paperback
Richard Dawkins is a passionate and enthusiastic advocate of the Darwinian theory of Natural Selection. He's best known for his recent broadside against organised – and disorganised – religion in his bestseller, The God Delusion. Dawkins, Darwinism's 'St Paul', uses this book to explain the workings of natural selection.
Dare I say it? Dawkins' sense of wonder and awe at the natural world is almost religious. It's certainly joyous! I was fascinated by his elaborately observed description of the common spider's labours to build her web. Magnificent.
Dawkins argues persuasively for natural selection using the parable of 'Mount Improbable'.He explodes the common myth that evolutionary development is based on random chance. That's an elementary misunderstanding of the theory. “Darwinism is not a theory of random chance. It is a theory of random mutation plus non-random cumulative natural selection.” This is a simple point not often grasped even by those who really ought to know better. Random chance couldn't work. IN Dawkins' parable Darwinism solves the problem of the theory of life by breaking the improbability involved into small manageable parts. Rather than looking at the towering cliffs in front of us we go up the back of the mountain by the gentle slopes 'inch by million-year inch'.
Mutation is the only random aspect of evolutionary development. Selection is non-random, the accumulation of little bits of luck. 'Animals make a living by eating, avoiding being eaten and reproducing'. The changes that allow more animals to survive and go forward tend to remain in their descendants.
Eyes are often cited as a problem for the theory of natural selection. In a wide-ranging chapter, The Forty-fold Path to Enlightenment, Dawkins examines the eyes of a wide variety of species – from scallops, spiders, insects and cats to humans. He explains how small incremental mutations can in computer projection show a good fish eye with a working lens in some 364,000 generations, even assuming that for every 101 animals that survived with each improvement, 100 survived without it. There are some forty different kinds of eyes in the natural world. One species of fish Bathylychnops exilis even has two supplementary eyes for looking downwards. These secondary eyes have a different type of lens than the primary eyes.
Darwin is often cited as saying, “to suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances , for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.” This, however was a rhetorical device He went on to say, “When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round,, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying, Vox Populi, Vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from an imperfect and simple eye to one perfect and complex, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever lightly varies, and the variations be inherited, , as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should ever be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, cannot be considered real.”
The most amazing story in the book is Dawkins' account of the 'enclosed garden' – the fig. The story of how figs are pollinated by very tiny wasps specific to each species of fig tree was mind-blowing in its complexity. The chapter alone is worth the price of the book.
This superb book is a terrific introduction to evolutionary science for anyone to grasp. That's Dawkins' genius. He has the happy knack of jettisoning impenetrable academic language in favour of proper English. He has to be one of the finest science writers around today.
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