Climbing Mount Improbable
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
What appears to be an insurmountable cliff face of biological complexity — the human eye, the spider's web, the wings of a bat — is, Richard Dawkins argues in Climbing Mount Improbable, nothing more than the summit of a gently graded slope, scaled one incremental step at a time by the blind but relentless force of natural selection. With characteristic brilliance, Dawkins dismantles the creationist argument of irreducible complexity, illustrating how evolution, given sufficient time, can produce structures of breathtaking intricacy without the aid of a designer. Using the metaphor of a mountain — sheer and unscalable from one face, yet accessible via a long, winding path from the other — he presents a unified and deeply persuasive case for Darwinian gradualism. Dawkins writes with the rare gift of making the profoundly technical feel viscerally exciting, weaving together genetics, computer modelling, and natural history into a seamless and authoritative narrative. Climbing Mount Improbable stands as one of the finest works in the tradition of popular science writing, sitting comfortably alongside his landmark The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker. The book challenges readers to reconceive their understanding of probability, design, and the deep history of life on Earth — and leaves one wondering just how many other apparent miracles of nature are, in fact, waiting to be climbed.
Author: Richard Dawkins
Format: Paperback
Genre: Biology
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Good
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
What appears to be an insurmountable cliff face of biological complexity — the human eye, the spider's web, the wings of a bat — is, Richard Dawkins argues in Climbing Mount Improbable, nothing more than the summit of a gently graded slope, scaled one incremental step at a time by the blind but relentless force of natural selection. With characteristic brilliance, Dawkins dismantles the creationist argument of irreducible complexity, illustrating how evolution, given sufficient time, can produce structures of breathtaking intricacy without the aid of a designer. Using the metaphor of a mountain — sheer and unscalable from one face, yet accessible via a long, winding path from the other — he presents a unified and deeply persuasive case for Darwinian gradualism. Dawkins writes with the rare gift of making the profoundly technical feel viscerally exciting, weaving together genetics, computer modelling, and natural history into a seamless and authoritative narrative. Climbing Mount Improbable stands as one of the finest works in the tradition of popular science writing, sitting comfortably alongside his landmark The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker. The book challenges readers to reconceive their understanding of probability, design, and the deep history of life on Earth — and leaves one wondering just how many other apparent miracles of nature are, in fact, waiting to be climbed.