I’ve read it (and most of Dawkin’s other “popular” books, as well as a couple of his journal papers) and it’s damn good up until the last few pages, whence he suddenly goes on a rant about how even if the evidence didn’t support natural selection as the primary mechanism for evolution, it would still be the only theory worth considering. It just stunned me that he’d make such an unnecessary logical leap after spending the entire book (and his previous books) building up a careful and fairly coherent picture of natural selection. He also goes into an occasional aside on athiesm in the midst of another topic, which doesn’t bother me but I imagine is dramatically off-putting to someone who is trying to reconcile a God-of-the-Gaps concept with natural selection. Instead of just acknowledging that a god-like creator is a non-falsifiable proposition and stopping his argument at demonstrating a lack of necessity for supernatural intervention, he has to push the reader off that cliff and follow him down. He’d be a lot more convincing if he had an editor that would axe this stuff and keep it limited to op-eds rather than popularizations of science.
Also, some of his conjecture about fig wasps has been contested by other zoologists, which doesn’t undermine natural selection overall but does question the specifics of that example. Still, he’s always a good read, and Watchmaker is one of his better books. After you’ve read The Selfish Gene, if you’re willing to get into slightly more technical territory (though still comprehensible to the layman) try The Extended Phenotype, which, if you are understanding it, will severly alter your world view about genes and selection. It’s probably the single most influential book I’ve read on evolution, though some of his concepts aren’t quite accepted into the mainstream (judging by the lack of presentation in undergraduate texts.) Again, the work spans back to the early '80s (it was published in 1982 I think, though it’s been revised in the late '90s) and so some of the specific details are up for debate, but the general theory seems sound.
Steven Jay Gould is a well-known and prolifically published “competitor” to Dawkins (but still a staunch supporter of natural selection), and in some ways is a more accessible read, though I don’t agree with the punctuated equilibrium hypothesis he pushes.
Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea is a nice look at the impact that natural selection has had on our scientific and philosophic point of view. Dennett tends to be a little dense and, because he’s a philosopher first, kind of runs you around in circles, but there are some very interesting observations regarding how the acceptance of evolution and natural selection fundamentally has changed science.
Thanks Stranger, more than enough. I still have the last 2 chapters to read in The Blind Watchmaker, so I have yet to encounter those last few pages. I’m gonna try to work the Gunslinger series from Stephen King in there as well, I’ve been meaning to read those for a while.
Sometimes I think that being rich would solve all my problems, it would at least give me time to read.
Another reading recommendation: Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World is pretty much indispensable in the fight against scientific ignorance, and indeed ignorance in general: it’s a very good read and not particularly technical - more a kind of field guide to thinking for yourself.
I give it a solid “Meh”. But then, I’m an unabashed “Gouldian” (and “Mayrian”, and “Dobzhanskian”…).
I would also recommend any of Gould’s "This View of LIfe "essay collections (Ever Since Darwin, The Panda’s Thumb, Hens’ Teeth and Horses’ Toes, etc.) as a counterpoint. The worst thing you can do in any study is restrict your reading to a single author, or only those that agree with a certain philosophy.
Heh. I feel the same way about Dawkin’s gene-centric view of selection.
And as a note to those who mention “carbon dating” - the general term is “radiometric dating”. Carbon dating is but one form of radiometric dating, and is pretty much useless for dealing with objects older than about 10,000 years (indeed, it fits within the time frame for most YECs, so I really don’t get why they’d even have a problem with it…except that by accepting the results of carbon dating, they would then have to accept, say, potassium-argon dating…). And, of course, radiometric dating is but one method for determining the ages of ancient things.
It’s wrong to think of any body, and particularly the human body, as “purely [a] vehicle for replicating genetic information”. We are not our genes; our genes are just basic instructions for how we go together. We get certain impulses from our genes by the way our brains are put together, but how we act and the choices we make have much more to do with our experiences than our genes. I-M-H-O, of course.
We (higher animals, and especially humans) do all kinds o’ stuff that has nothing to do with building more genes, and to look at our evolution as a guide to how we should act or a limitation on what we can be is like graduating from kindergarden but refusing to learn to read. That we can go from just being a massive structure of organized proteins to building the Sistine Chapel, writing “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, or landing on the Moon is the very opposite of bleak; it speaks of nearly unlimited potential in this world instead of some poorly conceptualized "afterlife’.
I think it’s great, but then, I think Python is a fantastic scripting language, so what do I know?
Seriously. I wish we had a conspiracy, something, anything, that amounted to an efficacious and moral way to stop these people. But the sad truth remains that when one is impervious to data, all you can do is hope their kind die off sooner than later through natural causes, and that they don’t breed at a significantly higher rate than the non-data-impervious.
Believe it or not, that idea, called “Omphalos Hypothesis,” was once seriously proposed. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omphalos_hypothesis. Philip Henry Gosse wrote a book in 1857 called Omphalos, which is Greek for navel. His hypothesis was that Adam had a navel. It’s not so ridiculous if you consider it this way: Your navel is a relic of your birth – but everything else about your body is also the result of past stages of growth. Gosse believed that God chose to start the universe as a finished product, but bearing signs of all the developmental stages that otherwise would have been required. Thus Adam had a navel as a relic of a live birth that never occurred, the created trees in Eden had growth rings that might be taken as relics of past seasons that had never happened, and the fossils are relics of an evolutionary process that never happened. God wasn’t trying to deceive us, he was only trying to save time. This is, of course, a classic example of what scientists call a “nonfalsifiable hypothesis”: It would be impossible to discover or even conceive of any evidence that would conclusively disprove it.
I wholeheartedly second the last sentance; and by reading the views of different proponants of natural selection you’ll find that they aren’t actually disagreeing on the fact of evolution, but on the interpretation and specific mechanisms of natural selection. The PE arguement is a prime example: no one really disagrees that species suddenly “explode” in variety after catastrophic events (or at least, at some points in the fossil record) but the contention lies in why this happens, and what it means to the theory of natural selection. So much for the Creationists who claim that “even the scientists don’t agree on evolution”.
And if you really want to understand natural selection, you need to read up on the supporting concepts, too. You can punt some things, like chemistry, and take them on faith (and given my meager background in that subject I usually do) but really comprehending natural selection requires a good basis in games theory and probability. You don’t have to be able to pass the GRE in Mathematics, but you should understand some basics, like the Prisoner’s Dilemma and Bayes’ Theorem. (Heck, if you’re going to make any real sense out of the newspaper you need to be able to handle statistics, anyway. Sure as shit most journalists can’t figure out which is up when it comes to interpreting medical studies or research data.)
And I second the whole reading list above, other than Ever Since Darwin which is still on my to-read list. Gould’s a good read, he explains things well, and if I don’t completely buy into his interpretation I still respect his work, and that of those whose ideas he includes in his writing.
