Richard Dawkins: books: Climbing Mount Improbable
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Climbing Mount Improbableby Richard Dawkins, 1996. Illustrations by Lalla WardUSA Publisher: W.W.
Norton & Company
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- Book and ordering infro for the hardcover or paperback from the UK publisher Penguin Books Ltd
- Book info from the US publisher W.W. Norton & Company
- Order the hardcover or paperback from the US online bookstore amazon.com
| Norton Book Jacket |  |
The
human eye is so complex and works so precisely that
surely, one might believe, its current shape and function
must be the product of design. How could such an
intricate object have come about by chance? Yet this is
exactly what Richard Dawkins argues in his provocative
and passionate new book--that life evolves through the
accident of mutation, and that perfection in the natural
world is the result of supreme, and fascinating,
improbability.
The metaphor of Mount Improbable represents this combination of perfection and improbability, which is epitomized in the seemingly "designed" perfection of living things. Dawkins skillfully guides the reader on a breathtaking journey through the mountain's passes and up its many peaks to demonstrate that following the improbable path to perfection takes time. Evocative illustrations accompany Dawkins's eloquent descriptions of natural perfections such as the teeming populations of figs, the intricate silken world of spiders, and the evolution of wings on the bodies of flightless animals. And through it all runs the thread of DNA, the molecule of life, responsible for its own destiny on an unending pilgrimage through time.
Climbing Mount Improbable is a book of great impact and skill, written by the most prominent Darwinian of our age.
| Viking Book Jacket | |
The towering cliffs of mount improbable can never, it seems, be climbed. In Richard Dawkins 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 fro 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 gently paths on the far side of Mount Improbable.
Richard 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 a fig is a garden for its own teeming population of insects; and we learn how the eye has evolved no less than forty times independently. And through all of it runs the thread of DNA, the molecule of life, responsible for its own destiny on an unending pilgrimage through geological time.
In The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker and River out of Eden Richard Dawkins revealed both the glorious variety and the underlying unity of life on earth. Here, once again, in writing of elegance and erudition, he inspires the reader with his contagious passion for the endless variety and adaptability of the gene and all its works.
| Reviews | |
- THE TIMES - The most amazing journey - Mark Ridley
- Self-help for a hedgehog stuck on a molehill - Stephen Jay Gould
- THE TIMES - Good Breeding - John Maynard Smith
- The New Statesman & Society - lost
- Telegraph - Faith that can leap mountains
- The Mystery of Life: Darwinism doesn't solve it - by John Horgan author of The End of Science
- A book review by Danny Yee
- Boston Review: Feeling for the Organism by Robert C. Berwick
- The Red Herring: Darwin at Large - Climbing Mount Improbable and Full House
- New Scientists: Planet Science - Chance is a Fine Thing
- The New York Times
- Audubon
- by Soh Kam Yung
| Related Links | |
- Samuel Zschokke - studies spider web-building behavior.
- Thiemo Krink - NetSpinner Simulation of spider web-building evolution
- A good page on ARACHNOLOGY
- B-EYE - See the world through the eyes of a honey bee
- Video Review by Matthew Cockerill of "Growing Up in the Universe" a series of five educational videos by Richard Dawkins (from 1991 The Royal Institution Faraday Lectures) The review includes some online video clips in RealVideo and QuickTime format! Published in HMS Beagle (Dec. 11, 1998 · Issue 44) Also listed there is a BioMedNet INCA Special Offer to purchase the tapes for $110 (non-UK orders) or £55 (UK orders)
| Endorsements | |
A beautiful, barnstorming, thunderclap of a book' - Mail on Sunday
A cracking good book on evolution' - John Gribbin in the Times Educational Supplement
Mount Improbable ... is Dawkins's metaphor for natural selection: its peaks standing for evolution's most complex achievements: the human brain, the squid's eye, and the albatross's aeronautical prowess ... exhilarating - a perfect, elegant riposte to a great deal of fuzzy thinking about natural selection and evolution' - Robin Mackie in the Observer
One of the most gifted storytellers of our generation ... he is a missionary who writes like an angel. He is to Darwinism what Saint Paul is to Christianity' - Mike Maran in Scotland on Sunday
The parables - rivetting biological narratives, enthralling as the Arabian Nights tales - continue to ring the changes. Yet the central message - that DNA transcends the significance of the organism - remains the same ... organisms are merely vehicles for genes ... This is vintage Dawkins' - John Cornwell in the New Scientist
An elegant series of lectures on Darwinian selection ... Dawkins continues a tradition of scientific writing from Galileo to Darwin' - Ian Thomson in the Daily Telegraph
Dawkins has done more than anyone else now writing to make evolutionary biology comprehensible and acceptable' - John Maynard Smith in the Sunday Times
| Selected Quotes and Excerpts | |
Excerpts from Chapter 3 - Message from the Mountain
Mount Improbable rears up from the plain, lofting its peaks dizzily to the rarefied sky. The towering, vertical cliffs of Mount Improbable can never, it seems, be climbed Dwarfed like insects, thwarted mountaineers crawl and scrabble along the foot, gazing hopelessly at the sheer, unattainable heights. They shake their tiny, baffled heads and declare the brooding summit forever unscalable.
Our mountaineers are too ambitious. So intent are they on the perpendicular drama of the cliffs, they do not think to look round the other side of the mountain. There they would find not vertical cliffs and echoing canyons but gently inclined grassy meadows, graded steadily and easily towards the distant uplands. Occasionally the gradual ascent is punctuated by a small, rocky crag, but you can usually find a detour that is not too steep for a fit hill-walker in stout shoes and with time to spare. The sheer height of the peak doesn't matter, so long as you don't try to scale it in a single bound. Locate the mildly sloping path and, if you have unlimited time, the ascent is only as formidable as the next step. The story of Mount Improbable is, of course, a parable. We shall explore its meaning in this and the next chapters.
...To this day, and
in quarters where they should know better, Darwinism is
widely regarded as a theory of 'chance'. It is
grindingly, creakingly, crashingly obvious that, if
Darwinism were really a theory of chance, it couldn't
work. You don't need to be a mathematician or physicist
to calculate that an eye or a haemoglobin molecule would
take from here to infinity to self-assemble by sheer
higgledy-piggledy luck. Far from being a difficulty
peculiar to Darwinism, the astronomic improbability of
eyes and knees, enzymes and elbow joints and the other
living wonders is precisely the problem that any theory
of life must solve, and that Darwinism uniquely does
solve. It solves it by breaking the improbability up into
small, manageable parts, smearing out the luck needed,
going round the back of Mount Improbable and crawling up
the gentle slopes, inch by million-year inch. Only God
would essay the mad task of leaping up the precipice in a
single bound. And if we postulate him as our cosmic
designer we are left in exactly the same position as when
we started. Any Designer capable of constructing the
dazzling array of living things would have to be
intelligent and complicated beyond all imagining. And
complicated is just another word for improbable - and
therefore demanding of explanation. A theologian who
ripostes that his god is sublimely simple has (not very)
neatly evaded the issue, for a sufficiently simple god,
whatever other virtues he might have, would be too simple
to be capable of designing a universe (to say nothing of
forgiving sins, answering prayers, blessing unions,
transubstantiating wine, and the many other achievements
variously expected of him). You cannot have it both ways.
Either your god is capable of designing worlds and doing
all the other godlike things, in which case he needs an
explanation in his own right. Or he is not, in which case
he cannot provide an explanation. God should be
seen by Fred Hoyle as the ultimate Boeing 747.
The
height of Mount Improbable stands for the combination of
perfection and improbability that is epitomized in eyes
and enzyme molecules (and gods capable of designing
them). To say that an object like an eye or a protein
molecule is improbable means something rather precise.
The object is made of a large number of parts arranged in
a very special way. The number of possible ways in which
those parts could have been arranged is exceedingly
large. In the case of a protein molecule we can actually
calculate that large number. Isaac Asimov did it for the
particular protein haemoglobin, and called it the
Haemoglobin Number. It has 190 noughts. That is the
number of ways of rearranging the bits of haemoglobin
such chat the result would not be haemoglobin. In the
case of the eye we can't do the equivalent calculation
without fabricating lots of assumptions, but we can
intuitively see that it is going to come to another
stupefyingly large number. The actual, observed
arrangement of parts is improbable in the sense that it
is only one arrangement among trillions of possible
arrangements.
Now, there is an
uninteresting sense in which, with hindsight, any
particular arrangement of parts is just as improbable as
any other. Even a junkyard is as improbable, with
hindsight, as a 747, for its Parts could have been
arranged in so many other ways. The trouble is, most of
those ways would also be junkyards. This is where the
idea of quality comes in. The vast majority of
arrangements of the parts of a Boeing junkyard would not
fly. A small minority would. Of all the trillions of
possible arrangements of the parts of an eye, only a tiny
minority would see. The human eye forms a sharp image on
a retina, corrected for spherical and chromatic
aberration; automatically stops down or up with an iris
diaphragm to keep the internal light intensity relatively
constant in the face of large fluctuations in external
light intensity; automatically changes the focal length
of the lens depending upon whether the object being
looked at is near or far; sorts out colour by comparing
the firing rates of three different kinds of
light-sensitive cell. Almost all random scramblings of
the parts of an eye would fail to achieve any of these
delicate and difficult tasks. There is something very
special about the particular arrangement that exists. All
particular arrangements are as improbable as each other.
But of all particular arrangements, those that aren't
useful hugely outnumber those that are. Useful devices
are improbable and need a special explanation.
This is another way of saying that objects such as these cannot be explained as coming into existence by chance. As we have seen, to invoke chance, on its own, as an explanation, is equivalent to vaulting from the bottom to the top of Mount Improbable's steepest cliff in one bound. And what corresponds to inching up the kindly, grassy slopes on the other side of the mountain? It is the slow, cumulative, one-step-at-a-time, non-random survival of random variants that Darwin called natural selection. The metaphor of Mount Improbable dramatizes the mistake of the sceptics quoted at the beginning of this chapter. Where they went wrong was to keep their eyes fixed on the vertical precipice and its dramatic height. They assumed that the sheer cliff was the only way up to the summit on which are perched eyes and protein molecules and other supremely improbable arrangements of parts. It was Darwin's great achievement to discover the gentle gradients winding up the other side of the mountain.
