Krishna
Richard Dawkins also is an author whose works we have reviewed before. We have the reviews for Unweaving The Rainbow and The Ancestor’s Tale, if you want two of the earlier reviews.
This is a small book in comparison with those two, but no less interesting for all that. He now takes another angle to the subject matter of almost all of his books – evolution. He is as cogent, persuasive and clear as ever. However, also as in other books, he wanders off a bit. More on that later.
He talks about the analogy of species intermingling to the water in the river. He talks about how the creationists’ argument that ‘half an eye is useless’ as used against evolution is without substance and talks about gradients or degrees of perception as it evolves.
He convincingly argues about how nature is neither cruel nor kind, but simply indifferent to the suffering it may cause some organisms in its path and gives the examples of digger wasps that paralyze and lay eggs inside caterpillars, keeping them alive but immobile until the offspring larvae have a chance to eat it from inside ‘kept fresh’. Evolution will “favour” whatever path is likely to propagate the continued existence of one of their own genes – and other genes do the same, in an eternal struggle for survival.
His argument that a merciful nature/ God will cause the digger wasp sting to also anaesthetize the caterpillar, or the suffering of an antelope as it is killed by a predator would be swift and kind. But nature does what it does. (As an aside, we can even argue that lions go for the kill swiftly, even if it is painful but feral dogs and hyenas eat the victims as they are alive. Gruesome and adds substance to the point Dawkins makes.
He also talks about the ruthless efficiency of evolution. If a bone/ organ is ‘too good’ compared to the rest of the body, evolution will ‘weaken it’ to save the resources and apply it elsewhere where it will do a greater good for the sole aim of gene propagation. Fascinating.
The last part of the book turns esoteric. He divides the development of life (or ‘self replicating entities’) into multiple thresholds, and tries to keep it relevant to life anywhere, not just on our planet. However, this fails to indicate what use that kind of speculation is, and secondly, how these progression may happen elsewhere. Fun to speculate that life needs to cross the thresholds, but if you remember that life as we know it will be still dominated by dinosaurs if they had not been extinct due to the fortuitous (for humans) impact from a large meteor that wiped them out and paved the way for mammal domination, it is hypothetical.
It is a small, fairly interesting work. Does it stand up there with Dawkin’s best works? I think not.
Let us say, 6/10
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