There is a class of great writers whose work settles into a loop, reorbiting an obsession in tome after tome: Eugene O'Neill, Richard Yates, Tennessee Williams. Nearly every time, they'd give us - with variations here and there - the same troubled households, the same sodden alcoholics. And it was fine. In the hands of a true artist, every revisitation adds a layer of complexity, deepening our involvement and understanding. Richard Dawkins follows this tradition. His eternal subject is Darwinism, and his obsession seems to be eliminating misguided or even sinister misconceptions about evolution. Dawkins wants us to share his certainty that evolution shaped the form of every single organism on the planet. And so, in each of his books, he presents, with ironclad reason and superb prose, an impassioned defense of the voyager who sailed on the Beagle. In Climbing Mount Improbable, Dawkins discusses what may seem to casual observers a chink in evolutionary theory - the fact that many organic phenomena are simply too damned intricate. So intricate that it seems impossible for them to have emerged without some sort of divine engineer who worked everything out on a cosmic blueprint. Here, Dawkins focuses more closely on the kinds of biological magic that seem particularly unlikely to be evolutionary artifacts because they appear to be "all or nothing." Examples include the eye and the ability to fly. An animal either can see, or it can't; likewise an animal either has the body structure and organs to allow it to fly, or it doesn't. So how could evolution, which generally moves by small incremental improvements, come up with something like sight or flight? Rest assured that Dawkins's explanations are sufficient to convince all but the most intransigent skeptic that evolution's potent cocktail of natural selection and mutation are sufficient to brew up such magic as the human eye or the pigeon in flight. (There's also a boffo section about spider webs.) My guess, though, is that it won't be doubters (and certainly not creationists) who devour Climbing Mount Improbable, but those already hooked on the author's ability to present the Darwinian aesthetic with a scientific rigor and an elegance that qualifies as literature. No matter how often Richard Dawkins writes on evolution, it's always worth hearing one more time.
Climbing Mount Improbable, by Richard Dawkins: US$25. W. W. Norton: (800) 233 4830, +1 (717) 346 2029.
STREET CRED
Atari DazeDawkinian Evolution
