I highly recommend you read any Dawkins book on evolution, if you want the best coherent explanation of the processes of natural selection.According to Wikipedia, Dawkins is "Darwin's Rottweiler". In this book, Dawkins attempts to explain how it is possible that evolution of such amazing instruments as eyes can happen through nothing more than natural selection. He explains in part through the use of his and others' computer simulations. I really *get* that natural selection with random mutation...

THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO CLIMBING MOUNT IMPROBABLERichard Dawkins makes an eloquent argument here, as he did in The Blind Watchmaker, for natural selection (and thereby against the unimaginative ideology of design by a supernatural creator and the dishonest progeny of that ideology, "intelligent design"*). He begins with a description of a very uninspired speech about the fig given by a creationist, and ends with his own wondrous scientific tale about the fig and its wasp.He talks about possibi...

After a couple weeks of slowly reading through this one, I gave up and skimmed the last 150 or so pages. This book was not as engaging as Blind Watchmaker or God Delusion, mostly because it's more of a biology text than a political treatise about evolution. I very much enjoyed the "what it all means" sections of the book, but those appear too infrequently between the "how it all works" sections. I can only read so much about fig wasps and nautilus shells. Still his explanation about the evolutio...

Once and for all: evolution is NOT about progress, a process tending towards a specific purpose and behind which, then, lies a designer. Using a metaphor (the climbing of a mountain) Dawkins insists here on the gradualism implied by evolution. Spiderwebs, the ability for some species to fly or, again, the eye are as many heights at the top of which he leads us and from where, evolution appears in all its simplicity. Besides, he defends his selfish gene hypothesis and, bounces back on the compute...

when richard wrote this book about the slow evolutionary plod of the evolving eye up the billion year probability mountain - a guy in the same faculty who he probably saw in the tea room was dr brian goodwin - who with the use of chaos computation proved that the eye in acetabularia could evolve and devolve spontaneously as appropriate ... richard never really went into 21st century computation, chaos theory and complexity and the chaos law of emergence ... and it was evident scientifically from...

Too many iffy chapters that were more boring than interesting...

Part of me feels really dumb reading this, because all I can do is take him at his word and go 'uh-huh, that must be how it's done'. Like what is this other guy who gave the book one star talking about with chaos theory and some kind of math that has proven that eyes could evolve or devolve spontaneously? What does that mean? How am I to judge what is right or not. Once again I have the gripe with Dawkins about not citing much, this book lacks any kind of citations. He tells you where to go to r...

I read this book almost by accident. It was a few years ago and I was joining a mail order book club and this was just "need one more for my new member special offers, this looks kind of interesting." I hadn't read anything about science for many years. I'd tried to read Stephen Jay Gould books a couple of times but I never enjoyed them, usually couldn't finish. I had a vague understanding from school about Darwin and evolution, but that was many moons ago!I got this, I read it and I was gobsmac...

A very difficult read. Including very fragmented chapters, though interesting.

This book being reviewed is titled, "Climbing Mount Improbable". The author is Richard Dawkins, who just happens to be one of my favorite authors. I read this book years ago, when I developed an interest in learning more about evolution. I liked the book so much, that I bought copies for my four adult children. To my surprise, none of them completely read it. About a month ago, I decided to reread it and perhaps discover why my kids didn't take to it like I did. I also wanted to see if it appear...

The central metaphor of the book is Mount Improbable, peaks of apparent design in the biological landscape, rising up from the chaos we might expect if organic structures formed by chance alone. Dawkins demonstrates how this mountain can be climbed, by taking the reader up the gradual slopes round the rear of the mountain which, with enough time, can be traversed by the process of evolution by natural selection.The chapters of the book can be roughly divided into two categories. In the first cat...

My first exposure to Richard Dawkins was through his debates and interviews on YouTube almost a decade ago. I was instantly charmed by his eloquence and his passion for popularizing and championing the cause of science but it somehow never occurred to me to look up his contributions to popular science literature. A few years later, I was watching a documentary on the Enron debacle and that's when I came to know about Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. Almost shockingly, the company's CEO, Jeff Skilling,...

I feel that this book was written solely as an attempt to refute ‘intelligent design’ theory. From the beginning to the end it provides examples of how evolution itself with no external aid could have led the species to the complexity it now possesses. The book starts and ends with a tale of the fig, and how it was a fig, and not an apple, that was offered to Adam by Eve, if Paradise had existed at all, that is. The fig grows at the top of Mountain Improbable- the peak of evolution as we know it...

This books was excellent; it marks the point where Dawkins really came into his own as an accessible pop-science writer. To add to what I've said before, anyone wanting a clear treatment on evolution designed for the layman should start with The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, followed immediately by Climbing Mount Improbable. Being that it was written much earlier than The Greatest Show on Earth, Climbing Mount Improbable is concerned more with theory than data, but it still...

I come from a family where almost everyone has something against Dawkins. And yet, I somehow won this book. To my surprise it is quite good. Some parts are a little outdated (especially the part about 3D printers and their nonexistence) but it makes sense as it was written 20 years ago.Once you accept that the author is a bit of an egomaniac, the book is well written, interesting and understandable even for those who never were that much into biology. My favourite parts are definitely those abou...

If you have found yourself questioning the fact of evolution with the common rejoinder "but what use is half an eye," and you really would like a serious answer to that, read this book.Dawkins explains exactly how 1/2 an eye is better than no eye at all, and just what 1/2 an eye might be. People often think of a literal half an eye, like an eyeball sliced in half, which is, admittedly silly. But if one thinks of a cell more light sensitive than it's neighbors, one can see how it might benefit th...

Nearly twenty years old, but, because it's so full of interesting detail, still very worth reading even for those who already have a decent grasp of natural selection and the ways in which it operates. There are really only a couple of things that clue you in to the book's age, e.g., his comments on 3D printing and nanotechnology, both areas in which progress has, I think, been more rapid that he expected.