Climbing mount improbable

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Mount Improbable is Dawkins's metaphor for natural selection, and the central message of this text is that DNA transcends the significance of the organism, and that organisms are merely vehicles for genes.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Dawkins (The Blind Watchmaker, LJ 2/1/87 and River Out of Eden, LJ 3/15/95) holds the chair in "Public Understanding of Science" at Oxford University and, if this book is any measure, does so with distinction. This readable, elegantly written, fascinating assessment of why and how living things evolve and how‘improbable as it may seem‘seemingly random systems abet evolution is the sort of book Stephen Jay Gould would write if he were at Oxford. (Dawkins is Masterpiece Theatre to Gould's National Geographic.) This is not easy science; Dawkins discusses genetics, natural selection, and embryology for hundreds of species spanning millions of years, but he does so in a way that both delights and instructs. This is a book for Gould lovers, certainly, but life scientists of all sorts would appreciate it, as would teachers in the life sciences: it's an invigorating trip through the history of life led by one of Darwin's most articulate disciples.‘Mark L. Shelton, Univ. of Massachusetts Medical Ctr., Worcester (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

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. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

Those who oppose evolution as an explanatory model have long raised the need for a designer. How else, they ask, could the complexities of the eye or any other complex organ evolve with such "extreme perfection?" Here is the reference to "climbing mount improbable." The path to high levels of adaptation is not traversed in a single saltation up the face of a cliff. The small changes that selection favors incrementally lead to the appearance of large alterations. As Dawkins says, "What we may think of as a way station up the slope towards a more advanced eye may be, for the animal itself ... the ideal eye for its own particular way of life." Often, a structure may be transformed so as to fulfill a new function: the sweat glands that cool the body can be modified to produce sexual attractants. As in his other books, Dawkins eloquently expresses, in nontechnical terms, the mechanisms of evolution. Here he focuses on the means by which natural selection orders genetic variation so as to achieve the improbable. In doing so he once again contributes to public scientific literacy, while also educating professionals. Recommended. All levels. M. L. Weiss Wayne State University

Kirkus Book Review

Dawkins (River Out of Eden, 1995, etc.), who now holds a Chair of Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, is at pains in this new work to refute creationists, who have long championed the argument that organs like the human eye could never have arisen ``by chance'' and that therefore a ``Designer'' must be at work. The point made early and oft repeated here is that creationists have got it all wrong: Mutations happen by chance (and are usually bad or at most neutral). But natural selection is not random: If the mutation confers an advantage, its possessor has the potential of leaving more offspring, allowing the mutation to spread. The book's title refers to Dawkins's metaphor for evolution: The process is, he suggests, somewhat like the act of climbing a mountain. One doesn't proceed by launching an immediate assault in a straight line from the base to the peak, but by necessarily working through a series of smaller hills first, attaining the summit gradually, in a seemingly roundabout way. Dawkins uses the evolution of eyes, of spider webs, and of wings, among other features, to press his argument, providing wonderfully rich examples from extinct and contemporary species. There are, however, some assumptions that may be questioned by other equally ardent Darwinists: For example, is evolution necessarily ``good''? Dawkins seems to think so, and, of course, from a selfish point of view it is, since it produced us. But, as Stephen Jay Gould has recently pointed out, the most successful creatures on earth are bacteria and insects, species that have been around for eons and probably will outlast the rest of us complex critters. A second debatable assumption is that evolution necessarily proceeds toward complexity, when much evidence seems to suggest otherwise. Wonderful metaphorical trees examined in minute detail (including a tour de force on actual fig trees and their pollinating wasps), but Dawkins's evolutionary forest may be just a bit overpopulated with complex and improvable species. (16 pages photos, 120 drawings, not seen) (Author tour)