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Title: Climbing Mount Improbable by Richard Dawkins, Lalla Ward ISBN: 0393316823 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: 1997 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.35
Rating: 5
Summary: Can This Man Write a Bad Book?
Comment: Though in a broad sense this book covers the same ground as the also-excellent _The Blind Watchmaker_, this one is less stridently argumentative in tone and consequently somewhat more accesible to the non-biologist. It also introduces a new metaphor for the process of evolution towards complexity, the titular Mount Improbable, which I find far superior to either the Blind Watchmaker (derived from and therefore permenantly bound to old Creationist arguments) or the author's much-beloved computer programs. The museum of hypothetical shells is another great addition to the annals of thought-experiment.
Another aspect of this book's greatness is the way in which Mr. Dawkin's love for biology, both in the sense of the study of living things and in the sense of the living things themselves, shows on nearly every page. Where in The Blind Watchmaker he often seemed angry (albeit rightfully so), here he is equally often simply enraptured by the sheer beauty of evolution and the products thereof. It's easy to see that this guy is a true naturalist, and his enthusiasm is infectious.
Now I move along to _Unweaving the Rainbow_ with high hopes and much anticipation.
Rating: 3
Summary: Interesting, but unlikely to win new converts
Comment: Climbing Mount Improbable is another of Richard Dawkins' popularly-accessible defenses of Darwinism. Dawkins discusses in detail the evolution of wings and eyes as well as the intriguing mutualistic relationship between figs and the wasps that fertilize them, and these more highly zoology-focused chapters are where he is at his best, which might be expected considering that he is a zoologist. He does an excellent job of exposing us to the diversity of wings and eyes throughout the animal kingdom and of using that diversity as an illustration of the power of natural selection. However, there are a number of weaknesses in the book which prevent it from being the sort of airtight argument for Darwinism that he seems to want it to be. He spends a lot of time discussing computer simulations of the evolution of things like spider webs and insects which serve ostensibly to show that random mutation and natural selection is enough to produce what we see in nature today. But these programs are inevitably gross oversimplifications of the matter (he seemed quite proud to note that his insect-generating program used a total of 16, count 'em, 16 genes) and their imitation of natural selection often consists of nothing more than the user picking the specimens in a generation which most resemble the ones which occur in the wild--this obviously biases the whole process and makes it seem like whatever point it is that he's trying to make with these programs (he doesn't make even that very clear) he's arriving at it in part by circular reasoning.
In discussing the wing, the eye, and the fig, Dawkins purports to be taking the most impressive adaptations in biology and showing that they've all been reached by, as he puts it using the apt metaphor on which the book is based, a gradual slope up Mount Improbable. In the case of the eye, he concentrates on the evolution of its shape and does a solid job at that. However, it seems like the evolution of photocells with light-detecting pigments and the development of the proper neural pathways to interpret signals from the eye would be considerably more substantial achievements than the eye simply attaining the shape it has today, and Dawkins leaves these issues out. Also, Dawkins never really gets around to addressing the issue of how complicated protein molecules like hemoglobin could have come into being through only random mutations and non-random natural selection, an question which, as Dawkins himself mentions, a number of people have some problems with.
All in all, a lot of Dawkins' writing, especially the final chapter on the fig, is quite fascinating and worth reading in its own right. However, as a defense of evolutionary theory, this book leaves a lot of mighty large holes open and consequently seems unlikely to convince the skeptics.
Rating: 3
Summary: A mixed bag
Comment: The reviews so far seem to be from Darwinists who like the book and creationists who don't. Count me as a Darwinist who's not too impressed. There's some interesting information here, but Dawkins' writing (and to some extent his thinking) is too sloppy to pull it all together. A good example is the chapter where he claims to demolish the Gaia hypothesis with "watertight" logic--in fact, he doesn't come close (hint: merely citing the obvious fact that animals and their genes act autonomously is not enough--the whole idea is that "Gaia", if such there be, is emergent behavior in a system of just such autonomous agents). And he's given to bouts of name-calling and mockery of what he doesn't understand--he starts by denouncing what sounds like a rather witty and interesting lecture on the literary and symbolic history of figs, apparently on the grounds that once we understand the science behind the fig we don't need all that stuff. And even when he's on relatively solid ground, discussing biology directly, his constant digressions get rather wearying.
Nevertheless, if you're looking for ruminations about the development of the eye or the wing, the ones here are interesting, and there's enough biological detail to make the book moderately worthwhile. But if you're looking for a cogent explanation of, and argument for, natural selection, Dennett's "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" would be a much better choice.
Oh, and a minor point--the typography in the book is quite poor, enough so to be irritating and to add to the general impression of sloppiness.
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Title: The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design by Richard Dawkins ISBN: 0393315703 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: 1996 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (Science Masters Series) by Richard Dawkins, Lalla Ward ISBN: 0465069908 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 1996 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder by Richard Dawkins ISBN: 0618056734 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co Pub. Date: 05 April, 2000 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins ISBN: 0192860925 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 1990 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene (Popular Science) by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett ISBN: 0192880519 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 1999 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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