Monday's Excerpts - River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life by Richard Dawkins

     River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life is a great read for anyone with an interest in Dawkins’ methods of the public understanding of science. Whether new or old to the man’s explanations, you’ll be refreshed with Dawkins’ style of presentation in a compact space of roughly one hundred and fifty pages, or introduced to his elaborate, yet simplistic explanations of the wondrous world and universe we inhabit. River Out of Eden is bound to leave you thirsty for more of his elegant writing style, and science in general.
     I haven’t read a book faster than I read River Out of Eden. From cover to cover it took me around three hours of a morning. Admittedly, I am a huge fan of Dawkins and had a relative understanding of nearly every topic he discussed in River Out of Eden, which might have quickened my pace. However, by reading his ideas in a space designed to be minimal, I got a deeper understanding of certain topics that already grasped my interest—such as dendrology—despite his discussion of it in other books. (For the curious: I believe Dawkins elaborated at length on dendrology and dendrochronology in The Greatest Show on Earth, which also happens to be my favorite book of all time.)
     If you haven’t read this yet, I highly recommend it for any audience. This is by far his easiest book to understand that I’ve read, which is quite a few. (I might even be nearing having read the majority of his works, but I shan’t count now.)

This Week's Book: River Out of Eden by Richard Dawkins

Chapter 2: All Africa and Her Progenies
     We get our mitochondria from our mothers only. Sperms are too small to contain more than a few mitochondria; they have just enough to provide the energy to power their tails as they swim toward the egg, and these mitochondria are cast away with the tail when the sperm head is absorbed in the egg at fertilization. The egg is massive by comparison, and its huge, fluid-filled interior contains a rich culture of mitochondria. This culture seeds the child’s body. So whether you are female or male, your mitochondria are all descended from an initial inoculum of your maternal grandmother’s mitochondria. None from your father, none from either grandfather, none from your paternal grandmother. The mitochondria constitute an independent record of the past, uncontaminated by the main nuclear DNA, which is equally likely to come from each of four grandparents, each of eight great-grandparents, and so on back. (Page 47)

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Chapter 3: Do Good by Stealth
     In the light of Nilsson and Pelger’s results, it is no wonder “the” eye has evolved at least forty times independently around the animal kingdom. There has been enough time for it to evolve from scratch fifteen hundred times in succession without any one lineage. Assuming typical generation lengths for small animals, the time needed for the evolution of the eye, far from stretching credulity with its vastness, turns out to be too short for geologists to measure! It is a geological blink. (Pages 82-83)

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Chapter 4: God’s Utility Function
     Why are forest trees so tall? Simply to overtop rival trees. A “sensible” utility function would see to it that they were all short. They would get exactly the same amount of sunlight, with far less expenditure on thick trunks and massive supporting buttresses. But if they were all short, natural selection couldn’t help favoring a variant individual that grew a little taller. The ante having been upped, others would have to follow suit. Nothing can stop the whole game escalating until all trees are ludicrously and wastefully tall. It is ludicrous and wasteful only from the point of view of a rational economic planner thinking in terms of maximizing efficiency. But it all makes sense once you understand the true utility function—genes are maximizing their own survival. . . . (Page 121)

Books finished this past week...
★☆☆☆☆ The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis

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