Book: Climbing Mount Improbable by Richard Dawkins
Krishna
Richard Dawkins is an author whose other works we have reviewed here. See, for example, the earlier reviews of The Blind Watchmaker or River Out of Eden in earlier posts.
Richard Dawkins has one of two recurring themes in his books as well. Evolution and atheism. The former occupies the core of most books of his. So it is with this one.
However, he has the gift of narration and each one of his books on evolution have a different perspective and so in my opinion still worth reading. As a bonus, there is an underlying humour in many of the books and also a treasure trove of wonderful trivia about nature. They both elevate the book to a level that repays the effort expended in reading with enjoyment as a reward.
Here for example, he talks about what seem to be perfectly engineered mechanisms coming about by evolution – random but targeted by the competition to propagate the species to the next generation by every organism competing to occupy a niche.
He talks about bio mimicry, which is always a fascinating subject. He presents an ant mimicking beetle that is amazing to view but came about as a survival tactic. (Any animal camouflage is towards the same purpose but these examples are breathtaking).
In the case of a termite mimicking beetle, the camouflage is weak but even more astonishing when you realize that the entire exterior seen anywhere except the side is a fake ‘shroud’ covering the real beetle which looks like an ordinary beetle hiding under it!
He also touches on the ‘more famous’ leafy sea dragon which is a seahorse looking spectacularly like a sea weed.
Pitcher plants in Seychelles have evolved ‘jars’ on the tips of its leaves so that not only water is collected but drowned insects can also be fed to the plant! To encourage the latter process, it produces a perfume that attracts them. How does the plant make the insects digestible? Maggots live within the jar and it is they who digest th insects and the plant absorbs the detritus of the insects left by maggots along with the water. Ingenious.
He also talks of the web weaving spiders and how they marvelously construct the web and what a great mechanism it is to catch prey. In addition, he also talks about the habit of female spiders eating male spiders after mating and how the males have evolved strategies – not always successful – to avoid being eaten. Fascinating stuff.
Ingenious ways to catch prey are discussed – the ladder web that is most effective with moths, and the triangular web that uses science of entanglement to capture the prey. All fascinating to read.
Then he launches into the esoterics of web building, which you can easily skip and not lose the gist of the argument, especially if you have a rudimentary or intermediate knowledge of how evolution works in nature.
He talks at length about how, though mutations are random, the competition for survival pushes the surviving mutations to improve in capabilities and complexity – speed, strength, camouflage etc.
He talks about how the eye and the wing, being complex objects could have evolved, and what the intermediate stages possibly could have been.
Now comes one of the problems I find in every one of this author’s books. You can call it delving too deep into details that add very little to the topic in discussion – which is another way of saying it could all be established without such detail – or just that I am seeking too much of fun fluff in a serious evolutionary text and therefore do not have the patience to delve into such important details that really clinch the argument. Either way, i was bored by the several pages that follow – first of how eyes could have been developed, how many types of eyes have evolved and what are the disadvantages of some and so on and so forth. Then he launches into an imaginary gigantic zoo that houses all possible animals and “walks” along different dimensions to talk about lengthening or shortening of horns, sharpening or flattening of teeth etc.
We learn of the extraordinary lengths some flowers go to in order to cross pollinate – the equivalent of copulation in plants. Apart from most flowers which have a pleasing appearance, colour and smell to attract insects (and an even more striking appearance under ultraviolet light that are within the visible spectrum of insects like bees) they bribe them with honey so that they can inadvertently carry their pollen to other flowers of the same type. But some to go extreme. There are orchids which simulate the behinds of female bees (or wasps depending on the plant). One of the wasp mimics called hammer orchid has a trap. When the male wasp descends on the ‘female behind’, it is repeatedly slammed against the pollen sac nearby and by the time the dazed wasp frees itself, its back is laden with pollen! And there are plants that mimic the small of a female bee in heat to lure bees!
He talks about the fig lifecycle which is fascinating in itself. With the fact that it is actually a flower garden turned inside out (for the miniature wasps which pollinate them, the details of which are themselves a little creepy if you want to eat another fig!) Amazing facts and explanations about these, as you would come to expect from almost any Dawkins book.
You learn a lot about fig wasps and how the figs and wasps play tricks on each other (evolutionally speaking).
For the pieces which in my view are too detailed for a casual reader (Yes, I admit I am looking for summaries and the author’s intention is different and therefore the expectation deviation is entirely from my side), I think this book deserves a 6/10
— Krishna