Climbing Mount Improbable
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4.4 • 16 Ratings
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
How could such an intricate object as the human eye - so complex and so precise - have come about by chance? In this masterful piece of popular science, Richard Dawkins builds a powerful and carefully reasoned argument for evolutionary adapatation as the force behind all life on earth. The metaphor of 'Mount Improbable' represents the combination of perfection and improbability that we find in the seemingly 'designed' complexity of living things. And through it all runs the thread of DNA, the molecule of life, responsible for its own destiny on an unending pilgrimage through time. Evocative illustrations accompany Dawkins' eloquent descriptions of astonishing adaptations in the living world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
While an enzyme molecule or an eye might seem supremely improbable in their complexity, they are not accidental, nor need we assume that they are the designed handiwork of a Creator, asserts Oxford biologist Dawkins (The Selfish Gene). This foremost neo-Darwinian exponent explains the dazzling array of living things as the result of natural selection--the slow, cumulative, one-step-at-a-time, non-random survival of chance variants. Both a frontal assault on creationism and an enthralling tour of the natural world, this beautifully illustrated study is based on a set of BBC lectures, imparting a tone at once conversational and magisterial. Dawkins explores how ordered complexity arose by discussing spiders' web-building techniques, the gradual evolution of elephant trunks and of wings (birds, he concludes, evolved from two-legged dinosaurs, not from tree gliders) and the symbiotic relationship between the 900 species of figs and their sole genetic companions, the miniature wasps that pollinate specific fig species. Using "computer biomorphs" (simulated creatures "bred" from a common ancestor), Dawkins demonstrates how varieties of the same plant or animal species can vary in shape because of differences in just a few genes. Author tour.
Customer Reviews
Climbing Mount inprobable
Richard Dawkins as ever provides the man in the street with a compelling and entertaining insight into his lifes work and intense study of Darwinian evolution and it's fascinating complexities going on everyday in the world around us.
Amazing
Richard Dawkins is one of the best scientific writers whose works i have ever had the pleasure to read. And Scott by the way, you used the wrong their...I guess god didn't teach you how to spell. Go read 'The God Delusion'.
What a joke
By the way Richard Dawkins is finished and flawed.
He even admits he cannot prove that God does not exist.
The more is revealed, the worse it becomes for Richard Dawkins and his Sophistry!
A sophistry that utterly fails in the demonstration.
He cannot demonstrate a single thing of truth and will lead many to there personality extinction. More than anything Richard Dawkins is a curse to mankind and will be seen as such as the truth becomes more apparent.