Monday’s Excerpts - The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins

This Week’s Book: The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins

Preface
. . . I want to inspire the reader with a vision of our own existence as, on the face of it, a spine-chilling mystery; and simultaneously to convey the full excitement of the fact that it is a mystery with an elegant solution within our grasp. . . . (Page xiv)

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Chapter 6: Origins and miracles
     If the origin of life were a probable event by ordinary human standards, then a substantial number of planets within radio range should have developed a radio technology long enough ago (bearing in mind that radio waves travel at 186,000 miles per second) for us to have picked up at least one transmission during the decades that we have been equipped to do so. There are probably about 50 stars within radio range if we assume that they have had radio technology for only as long as we have. But 50 years is just a fleeting instant, and it would be a major coincidence if another civilization were so closely in step with us. If we embrace in our calculation those civilizations that had radio technology 1,000 years ago, there will be something like a million stars within radio range (together with however many planets circle round each one of them). If we include those whose radio technology goes back 100,000 years, the whole trillion-star galaxy would be within radio range. Of course, broadcast signals would become pretty attenuated over such huge distances. (Page 165)

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Chapter 10: The one true tree of life
     Indeed, it is important to understand that all mammals – humans, whales, duck-billed platypuses, and the rest – are exactly equally  close to fish, since all mammals are linked to fish via the same common ancestor. The myth that mammals, for instance, form a ladder or ‘scale’, with ‘lower’ ones being closer to fish than ‘higher’ ones, is a piece of snobbery that owes nothing to evolution. It is an ancient, pre-evolutionary notion, sometimes called the ‘great chain of being’, which should have been destroyed by evolution but which was, mysteriously, absorbed into the way many people thought about evolution. (Page 263)

Books finished this past week...
★★★★☆ Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom
★★★★☆ Mortal Coils by Aldous Huxley

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