Climbing Mount Improbable by Richard Dawkins

3.99 AVERAGE

chaoticbookgremlin's profile picture

chaoticbookgremlin's review

4.0
funny informative relaxing fast-paced

paging_snidget's review against another edition

4.0
Very interesting book but also found it quite hard to get through in parts.

dr_ju's review against another edition

4.0
3.5/5

I’m not sure how high I managed to climb the Mount Improbable.
Mr. Dawkins takes us in this book in a journey of observing nature designs and the way he picks random pieces of work and places them under the microscope for us to examine reminded me of Darwin’s Origin of species. It does help for the understanding of the big picture if you have read Darwin’s book but it’s not a requirement.



The writer makes his own pertinent statements on the subject while trying to clarify some statements of his colleague. His main idea would be that “Darwinism is not a theory of random chance. It is a theory of random mutation plus non-random cumulative natural selection”.



The most interesting idea I found is this: “It is easy to think of DNA as the information by which a body makes another body like itself. It would be more correct to see a body as a vehicle used by DNA to make more DNA itself”. According to this all the living things are mere informational containers and I agree with it. Our whole life and social behavior are driven by the idea of preserving and improving our informational baggage: be healthy, live long, and find a suitable partner who can provide the same if not better genes, and so on. We’re used even by viruses as an informational container and 3D printer.

While the subject of the book is of a pure scientific mater, the writer’s personality somehow gets in the way of it. The book is sprinkled with acid remarks targeting the adepts of creationism, ignorant people of fellow colleagues; I don’t want to know if those people are wrong or not or in what way, I’m just interested in pure facts presented in an objective way. These remarks and the somehow arrogant attitude of Mr. Dawkins prevented me from giving 5 starts to this book because it really bothered me. I hope from the peak of his Mount Improbable he will come back to earth among us, all mortal ignorant people.


lilas_knife's review against another edition

5.0
well can you give this book any less? so thoroughly explained and stuffed with the most unbelievable examples, pictures and razor sharp explanations (which may take you some time to understand, but that is nature's fault). I love his books but I am afraid the more I read, the more the theme and general ideas will just repeat and the amazing examples may not interest me enough... but not yet, definitely.
octavia_cade's profile picture

octavia_cade's review

4.0
Extremely clear and very interesting exploration of how evolutionary change is a result of small useful changes built up over time. And when it's laid out like this it reads like clear common sense - apart from the last chapter, which repeats "fig" and "wasp" so very bloody often that both terms begin to lose all meaning, like when you spend too much time looking at a single word and the shape of it turns alien. But that's a small quibble, when placed against the chapter on the development of the eye. At near 60 pages, it's by far the longest chapter in here, but it's also the absolute highlight of the entire book. At first glance (ha, I know) the eye seems such a complex organ to have developed, and though I know that it's a product of evolution like all other organs, I couldn't have made the first guess of how the intervening stages developed. Well now I understand the basics at least, and isn't science marvellous? (Yes, even the figs.) It's fair to say this book requires some effort, but such effort is well-rewarded I think.
missnicelady's profile picture

missnicelady's review against another edition

3.0
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 evolution of the eye clearly stomps on the Intelligent Design proponents, who often tout it as being far too complicated for anyone but the Almighty to have devised in his magic sky-lab. Dawkins wrote this book in the mid-90s, so he's definitely gotten more passionate and direct in demolishing ID arguments. This book is but a glimmer.
ajones9543's profile picture

ajones9543's review

3.75
challenging informative inspiring slow-paced

animus96's review against another edition

3.0
2.5 really. A punto estuve de dejar el libro por la mitad (por los tecnicismos y demás) pero valió la pena llegar hasta el final por los últimos capítulos y en especial por la genial explicación de la coevolución y entomogamia de las higueras y las avispas de los higos.
remocpi's profile picture

remocpi's review against another edition

5.0
Maravillosa introducción a la teoría de la Evolución, en el que asemeja la llegada a la cima de la evolución de una especie (definiendo la cima como el momento actual, claro,: los organismos no evolucionan con un fin definido sino adaptándose a las circunstancias de su entorno) con la escalada de un monte cuyo relieve se desconoce. En particular, la explicación de cómo el ojo ha evolucionado repetidamente en varias especies de manera independiente es maravillosa. Al enfocar la evolución del ojo con simulaciones corriendo miles y miles de posibilidades y pequeñas mutaciones, vemos , *vemos* cómo es posible que evolucione un ojo y entendemos por qué era inevitable. Un libro que debería ser de obligada lectura en el bachillerato.

abslax's review against another edition

2.0
challenging informative