Climbing Mount Improbable

The towering cliffs of Mount Improbable can never, it seems, be climbed. In Richard Dawkins's remarkable new book the heights of Mount Improbable represent the combination of perfection and improbability that is epitomized in the seemingly "designed" perfection of living things. From the combination of strength and sensitivity of an elephant's trunk to the life-saving camouflage of an ant-mimicking beetle, the living world is populated by creatures that seem miraculously designed for the lives they lead. But these complex and brilliantly effective features cannot have come about by undirected chance. That would be equivalent to scaling the sheer face of the mountain in a single leap. The only way to explain seemingly designed objects is by slow, gradual evolution - inching cumulatively, almost infinitely slowly by the standards of human history, up the gentle paths on the far side of Mount Improbable. Dawkins guides the reader through the spectacular mountain passes of the natural world. We are led through the silken world of spiders; we are shown how wings gradually sprouted on the bodies of flightless animals; we see how the fig is a garden for its own teeming population of insects; and we learn that the eye has evolved no less than forty times independently. And through it all runs the thread of DNA, the molecule of life, responsible for its own destiny on an unending pilgrimage through geological time. 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. Facing Mount Rushmore -- Silken Fetters -- Message From The Mountain -- Getting Off The Ground -- Forty-fold Path To Enlightenment -- Museum Of All Shells -- Kaleidoscopic Embryos -- Pollen Grains And Magic Bullets -- Robot Repeater -- 'a Garden Inclosed'. Richard Dawkins ; Original Drawings By Lalla Ward. Includes Bibliographical References And Index. Arguing that the perfection of the human body is the result of improbable mutation, a prominent Darwinian uses the metaphor of climbing a mountain to illustrate how natural perfection is due to the unending journey of DNA through time In this book, Richard Dawkins urges us to put aside superstitions and wake up to a universe far more wondrous than those in any myths, by describing the difference between accident and design in evolution.