Climbing Mount Improbable by Richard Dawkins
I’ve been going through a major Dawkins phase recently – brought on in part no doubt by the debate around The God Delusion , published last year. The phase has involved reading books from his backlist that I’d never looked at before; why, I now don’t know. Having read most of his work by now, I can tell you with confidence that it’s outstanding, and that any book of his you buy is probably worth more than you paid for it. Climbing Mount Improbable, first published in 1996, certainly is.
So what is the Dawkins secret? Why is he as successful as he is? Well, keeping things simple and stupid, I reckon if you start off with an interesting subject, like the evolution of the living world by natural selection, and an author who really knows about that subject, then you’re halfway to producing a decent book. Dawkins’s purpose here is to explain how evolution can possibly have scaled the improbable peaks of engineering we see in the flight of birds, animal vision and so on, not by an impossible leap, and not by scaling the apparently forbidding face of Mount Improbable that first meets our eye, but by finding the gentle slopes on the other side and ascending gradually over a long time. Dawkins’s knowledge of the animal kingdom, and of the ways animals ‘earn’ their living in the world, is clearly immense. He also loves his subject, and the passion is conveyed in every chapter. He’s endlessly fascinated by weird creatures like the leafy sea dragon, the unusual colugo from the Philippines, pitcher plants, echinoderms, flying fish and lizards, and after a few pages in Dawkins’s company, surrounded by examples of these wonderful beasts, we’re bound to be fascinated too.
He shows us, using ‘biomorph’ computer models he pioneered in The Blind Watchmaker, how spiders’ webs can have evolved to be such wonderfully effective fly-catchers. He explains how winged flight almost certainly originated in small animals because of their proportionately larger surface area:
[a perfectly scaled-down hippopotamus, the size of a flea] would be lifted by the lightest puff of wind. It could be carried high on a thermal, and then float delicately back to earth where it would land softly and without injury. The real hippo, if dropped from the same height, would plummet to a terrible crash landing; and if dropped from a scaled-up proportional height it would dig its own grave. For the real hippo, flying is an impossible dream. The flea-hippo would hardly be able to help flying if it tried. To make a real hippo fly… well, the project is doomed from the start because the mass of muscle needed to power those gigantic wings would be too heavy for the wings to lift. If you wanted to make a flying animal, you wouldn’t start with a hippo.
The sheer fun of what’s pictured here serves the argument brilliantly, as does Dawkins’s gift for encapsulating his points so graphically. That last quote reminds me, in fact, that this book has its origins in Dawkins’s Royal Institution Christmas lectures back in the mid-1990s, where illustrative fun is at a premium.
One of his key techniques is to make realise that we humans see the world in a particular way, because of the way have evolved to adapt to our circumstances and way of life – our size, our life-span, and so on. He helps us escape from those limitations and start to see nature from the viewpoint of other animals, so as better to understand why they are as they are. Take this example:
We think of the forest as rising up from the ground. We see it from the vantage point of big, heavy, clumsy ground-dwelling animals… But most of the inhabitants of the forest live in the canopy… Their forest is a vast, gently undulating, sunlit green meadow which, though they hardly notice the fact, just happens to be raised up on stilts.
Or this one, about why sperm-whales have lungs:
Having been naturally selected through millions of sea-going generations, sperm whales can submerge for fifty minutes before they have to breathe. Coming to the surface to breathe, for a whale, might feel rather like going off to urinate. Or for a meal. If you start to think of breaths as meals, rather than as a continually vital necessity, it becomes less obvious that every underwater creature would ideally be better off with gills.
How much more exhilarating this is, how much more radically de-centring, in fact, than the insistence of literary theorists, post-structuralists and their like that our thoughts are bounded by the limits of our subjectivity?
Dawkins structures his material thoughtfully, making sure we are introduced to the concept of pre-adaptation – the idea that characteristic of an animal that have evolved as adaptations for one purpose may incidentally aid survival in another way, so that natural selection favours it development for that purpose – in time to explain that wings might initially have functioned as solar energy panels before reaching the critical size, in relation to an insect of certain body dimensions, to provide aerial lift.
At heart of the book, chapter five is a brilliant extended essay on the evolution of the eye, or rather of eyes, since we learn that
‘the’ eye, legendarily difficult though its evolution sometimes seems, has actually evolved at least forty and probably sixty times independently all around the animal kingdom
Dawkins takes on what’s traditionally thought of as the ultimate problem for evolutionary theory, explaining how our amazing vision might have developed gradually rather than being precision-engineered by some ‘intelligent designer’. He takes us through the possible origin of the photocell from any light-sensitive surface cell or pigmented skin; the way a ‘cup’ eye can develop gradually, giving increased ability to detect where light is coming from; and through the development of a pinhole aperture in front of the photocells, to provide something like a camera eye. Dawkins shows us how even rudimentary devices such as polythene bags filled with water can function as reasonable lenses, and how the gelatinous mass inside the primitive eyes of humanity’s worm-like ancestors could easily over evolutionary time have detached itself from the retina or developed differential refractive indices, ending up as a lens better than those produced by Carl Zeiss. Again, part of his technique for making us wonder at this natural technology is to defamiliarise vision:
[the sun] offered the chance of a remote guidance technology. It pummelled every square millimetre of Earth’s surface with a fusillade of photons; tiny particles travelling in straight lines at the greatest speed the universe allows… photons provided the opportunity for remote-sensing technologies of enormous accuracy and power. It was necessary only to detect photons and –more difficult – distinguish the directions from which they came. Would the opportunity be taken up? Three billion years later you know the answer, for you can see these words.
Dawkins explains how the compound eye, a completely different approach to image-forming, developed independently in insects and tells us about genetic evidence suggesting that the common ancestors of fruit flies, mice and men almost certainly had eyes - that we share ‘eye’ DNA with these creatures. Even Darwin, possibly influenced by his wife, was troubled by some doubt about how the eye can have evolved by natural selection, but as Dawkins persuades us, “nothing is as difficult to evolve as we humans imagine it to be”. He triumphantly shows us why Darwin was right to put those doubts aside:
A sceptic about the power of evolution, such as Emma Darwin, is naturally drawn to the view that an organ as notoriously complicated and many-parted as an eye, if it can evolve at all, will take an immense time to evolve…the evolution of the lens eye could have been accomplished in less than half a million years… The plaint that there hasn’t been enough time for the eye to evolve turns out to be not just wrong but dramatically, decisively, ignominiously wrong.
There follows a study of shells, again through the device of computer biomorphs and the positing of three variable properties or dimensions, ‘verm’, ‘flare’ and ‘spire’, introducing us to the controversy between strict selectionists and those who think the embryonic limits on possible random mutation play a key role in directing evolution. He takes time to deflate the theory of punctuated equilibrium and the creationists who abuse it, arguing that the apparent lack of fossil intermediates between species simply results from our habits of taxonomy. There’s also an absorbing discussion of ‘kaleidoscopic embryology’, the grammar of mutation and the power of bodily segmentation as a framework for evolution. Finally, comparing viruses with their computer equivalents and animals with robots, he tells us
Flowers and elephants are ‘for’ the same thing as everything else in the living kingdoms, for spreading Duplicate Me programs written in DNA language. Flowers are for spreading copies of instructions for making more flowers. Elephants are for spreading copies of instructions for making more elephants. Birds are for spreading copies of instructions for making more birds.
Yes, Dawkins is lucky enough to have a subject many people are interested in, but then many, many subjects are fascinating if the person who’s telling us about them can engage our interest as well as Dawkins does. He’s committed to certain ideas about nature and to communicating them to us, and in part it’s this engagement that draws us in. But a key reason he’s so successful is simply that he writes so well. As I think I’ve shown, he uses uses metaphors freely to boost his explanatory power – the book’s central metaphor of Mount Improbable, obviously, but also the pervasive metaphor of computer programming and cybernetics, extended to the point of conceit in his use of ‘biomorphs’ – but he also takes care to draw our attention to the ways metaphor can mislead, too, particularly where useful figures of speech implicitly attribute purpose to nature. He’s a model of clarity, in fact, pacing his explanations deliberately, in line with the vision of scientific explanation he sets out at the very start of the book; and his sentences are not only clear, but beautifully balanced. I think his trick is that he writes for the ear as well as the page: he’s a hugely experienced lecturer of course, so is used to writing a script to be performed by a very visible audience. But I seem to remember reading once (I forget where – perhaps in another of his books) that his wife, Lalla Ward, helps him by reading his drafts aloud as he works. I can believe that: it’s easy to imagine very paragraph being read as a lecture. Clearly, Dawkins works hard at his writing, and we’ve every reason to be grateful for the results. This is popularisation at a very high level, the presentation of important ideas to an interested and usually (but not here) underestimated public, with the typical engaging clarity that’s justifiably made Richard Dawkins Britain’s leading public intellectual.
What a huge contrast with the Terry Eagleton book I reviewed in August. With Dawkins, you actually get an author who cares about a real subject, in the real world, and cares about communicating about it, too. Rather than simply musing on the meanings of meanings, he gets out more, intellectually and imaginatively speaking. From Dawkins, you actually learn things, including things about what life means.
Have your say - join the discussion