Richard Dawkins: books: River out of Eden
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River
out of Eden:
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- Book information from HarperCollins Publishers
- Order the paperback from the online bookstore amazon.com
| Book Jacket |  |
How did the
replication bomb we call "life" begin and where
in the world, or rather, in the universe is it heading ?
Writing with characteristic wit and the ability to
clarify complex phenomena, Richard Dawkins confronts this
ancient mystery.
Dawkins has been named by the London Daily Telegraph "the most brilliant contemporary preacher of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution." More than any other contemporary scientist, he has lent credence to the idea that human beings - indeed all living things - are mere vehicles of information, gene carriers whose primary purpose is propagation of their own DNA. In this new book, Dawkins explains evolution as a flowing river of genes, genes meeting, competing, uniting, and sometimes separating to form a new species.
Filled with absorbing, at times, alarming stories about the world of bees and orchids, "designed" eyes and human ancestors, River out of Eden answers tantalizing questions: Why are forest trees tall - wouldn't each survive more economically if all were short ? Why is the sex ration fifty-fifty when relatively few males are needed to impregnate many females ? Why do we inherit genes for fatal illnesses ?
Who was our last universal ancestor ? Dawkins suggests that it was more likely to have been an Adam than an African Eve. By "reverse engineering," he deduces the purpose of life ("Gods Utility Function"). Hammering home the crucial role of gradualism in evolution, he confounds those who argue that every element of, say, an eye has to function perfectly or the whole system will collapse. But the engaging, personal, frequently provocative narrative that carries us along River out of Eden has a larger purpose: the book illustrates the nature of scientific reasoning, exposing the difficulties scientists face in explaining life. We learn that our assumptions, intuitions, origin myths, and trendy intellectual and cultural "isms" all too often lead us astray.
| Reviews | |
Los Angeles Times
New
Scientist: Planet Science - Life is not fair
Boston
Book Review - Homage to Evolution
Australian
Skeptics
Cornell
Science & Engineering Review
Evolution
or Creationism: Does science and religion compete in the
same arena? by Hans O. Melberg
The New York Times -
"Natural Selections" - ( Excellent!
)
by
John Gribbin
| Related Links | |
Comments
and quotes from Susan
Stepney
No
mercy on the violent river of life - his summary of River
out of Eden
| Endorsements | |
"Richard Dawkins, our most radical Darwinian
thinker, is also our best science writer. He writes with
clarity, grace, and intense intellectual excitement,
making River out of Eden a model of
simplicity and power"
Douglas Adams
| Selected Quotes and Excerpts | |
"The world becomes full of organisms that have what
it takes to become ancestors. That, in a sentence, is
Darwinism." (p.2)
"Each generation is a filter, a sieve; good genes tend to fall through the sieve into the next generation; bad genes tend to end up in bodies that die young or without reproducing. Bad genes may pass through the sieve for a generation or two, perhaps because they had the luck to share a body with good genes. But you need more than luck to navigate successfully through a thousand sieves in succession." (p.3)
"The river of my title is a river of DNA, and it flows through time, not space. It is a river of information, not a river of bones and tissues; a river of abstract instructions for building bodies, not a river of solid bodies themselves." (p.4)
"...Yet the genetic code is in fact literally identical in all animals, plants and bacteria that have ever been looked at. All earthly living things are certainly descended from a single ancestor." (p.12)
"What is truly revolutionary about molecular biology in the post-Watson-Crick era is that it has become digital." (p.16)
"The genetic code is not a binary code as in computers, nor an eight-level code as in some telephone systems, but a quaternary code with four symbols. The machine code of the genes is uncannily computerlike." (p.17)
"There is no spirit-driven life force, no throbbing, heaving, pullulating, protoplasmic, mystic jelly. Life is just bytes and bytes and bytes or digital information." (p.18)
"We - and that means all living things - are survival machines programmed to propagate the digital database that did the programming." (p.19)
"Science shares with religion the claim that it answers deep questions about origins, the nature of life, and the cosmos. But there the resemblance ends. Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not." (p.33)
"Your DNA may be destined to mingle with mine. Salutations!" (p.37)
"There are hundreds of different proteins, each changing at its own characteristic rate per million years and each independently usable for reconstructing family trees. They all yield pretty much the same family tree - which, by the way, is rather good evidence, if evidence wrer needed, that the theory of evolution is true." (p.44)
"Never say, and never take seriously anyone who says, 'I cannot believe that so-and-so could have evolved by gradual selection.' I have dubbed this kind of fallacy 'the Argument from Personal Incrudulity." Time and again, it has proven the prelude to an intellectual banana-skin experience." (p.70)
"If one pace represents one century, the whole of Anno Domini time is telescoped into a cricket pitch. To reach the origin of multi-cellular animals on the same scale, you'd have to slog all the way from New York to San Francisco." (p.78)
"...it seems that it would take less than half a million years to evolve a good camera eye ... It's no wonder 'the' eye has evolved at least 40 times independently around the animal kingdom ... It is a geological blink." (pp.82-83)
"This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous - indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose." (p.96)
"Alternatively, if there is only one Creator who made the tiger and the lamb, the cheetah and the gazelle, what is He playing at? Is he a sadist who enjoys spectator blood sports? Is he trying to avoid overpopulation in the mammals of Africa? Is he manuvering to maximize David Attenborough's television ratings? ... the true utility function of life, that which is being maximized in the natural world, is DNA survival. But DNA is not floating free; it is locked up in living bodies and it has make the most of the levers of power at its disposal." (p.105)
"In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference." (p.133)
