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Climbing Mount Improbable
Climbing Mount Improbable (Paperback)
By Richard Dawkins
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How do species evolve? Richard Dawkins, one of the world’s most eminent zoologists, likens the process to scaling a huge, Himalaya-size peak, the Mount Improbable of his title. An alpinist does not leap from sea level to the summit; neither does a species utterly change forms overnight, but instead follows a course of “slow, cumulative, one-step-at-a-time, non-random survival of random variants”–a course that Charles Darwin, Dawkins’s great hero, called natural selection. Illustrating his arguments with case studies from the natural world, such as the evolution of the eye and the lung, and the coevolution of certain kinds of figs and wasps, Dawkins provides a vigorous, entertaining defense of key Darwinian ideas.
A Devil’s Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love
A Devil’s Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love (Hardcover)
By Richard Dawkins
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Richard Dawkins has an opinion on everything biological, it seems, and in A Devil’s Chaplain, everything is biological. Dawkins weighs in on topics as diverse as ape rights, jury trials, religion, and education, all examined through the lens of natural selection and evolution. Although many of these essays have been published elsewhere, this book is something of a greatest-hits compilation, reprinting many of Dawkins’ most famous recent compositions. They are well worth re-reading. His 1998 review of Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont’s Fashionable Nonsense is as bracing an indictment of academic obscurantism as the book it covered, although the review reveals some of Dawkins’ personal biases as well. Several essays are devoted to skillfully debunking religion and mysticism, and these are likely to raise the hackles of even casual believers. Science, and more specifically evolutionary science, underlies each essay, giving readers a glimpse into the last several years’ debates about the minutiae of natural selection. In one moving piece, Dawkins reflects on his late rival Stephen Jay Gould’s magnum opus, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, and clarifies what it was the two Darwinist heavyweights actually disagreed about. While the collection showcases Dawkins’ brilliance and intellectual sparkle, it brings up as many questions as it answers. As an ever-ardent champion of science, honest discourse, and rational debate, Dawkins will obviously relish the challenge of answering them. –Therese Littleton
