Book Review: Climbing Mount Improbable

Author: Dr. Richard Dawkins
Spiritual Bias: Atheist
Origins Bias: Evolutionist
Rating: Middle of the Road
Level: Intermediate

Comments: In this title Dawkins attempts to explain how evolution can result in the complex features found in life such as eyes and wings. He thinks that by accumulating small improvements there's practically no limit to what evolution can do. Unfortunately what he does not demonstrate is that information bearing mutations actually do occur in organisms to provide these so called variations of small improvement for natural selection to work on. He waxes eloquently about how natural selection can work its way up the magnificent peaks of Mount Improbable (his metaphor for complex features) but fails to describe in detail the mechanism that takes the steps up the mountain. In my opinion this is where I think evolution falls down. Random mutations simply do not add the type of information needed to construct complex features. In addition developmental biology is often so highly interdependent (i.e.nematode development) its rare that you will have a mutation that can improve one feature and not have an adverse negative effect on another separate feature. My thinking about evolution is what it was before I read this book: highly unlikely.

Summary Quote: "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."