Climbing Mount Improbable Quotes

“Darwinism is not a theory of random chance. It is a theory of random mutation plus non-random cumulative natural selection. . . . Natural selection . . . is a non-random force, pushing towards improvement. . . . Every generation has its Darwinian failures but every individual is descended only from previous generations' successful minorities. . . . [T]here can be no going downhill - species can't get worse as a prelude to getting better. . . . There may be more than one peak.”
― Richard Dawkins, Climbing Mount Improbable

“Darwinism is not a theory of random chance. It is a theory of random mutation plus non-random cumulative natural selection. Why, I wonder, is it so hard for even sophisticated scientists to grasp this simple point?”
― Richard Dawkins, Climbing Mount Improbable

“No sane creator, setting out from scratch to design a flat-fish, would have conceived on his drawing board the absurd distortion of the head needed to bring both eyes round to one side.”
― Richard Dawkins, Climbing Mount Improbable

“we’re apt to forget that symmetry is not an obvious quality that every creature must have.”
― Richard Dawkins, Climbing Mount Improbable

“Dan Nilsson even remarks of compound eyes that ‘It is only a small exaggeration to say that evolution seems to be fighting a desperate battle to improve a basically disastrous design.”
― Richard Dawkins, Climbing Mount Improbable

“Evolution is an enchanted loom of shuttling DNA codes, whose evanescent patterns, as they dance their partners through geological deep time, weave a massive database of ancestral wisdom, a digitally coded description of ancestral worlds and what it took to survive in them.”
― Richard Dawkins, Climbing Mount Improbable

“In the evolution of the elephant from its short-nosed ancestors, there must have been a smooth, gradual succession of steadily longer noses, a sliding gradient of thickening muscles and more intricately dissected nerves. It must have been the case that, as each inch was added to the length of the average trunk, the trunk became better at its job. It must never be possible to say anything like: 'That medium-sized trunk is no good because it is neither one thing nor the other—falls between two stools—but don't worry, give it another few million years and it'll be fine.' No animal ever made a living purely by being on the evolutionary path to something better. Animals make a living by eating, avoiding being eaten, and reproducing. If a medium-sized trunk were always less efficient for these purposes than either a small nose or a big trunk, the big trunk would never have evolved.”
― Richard Dawkins, Climbing Mount Improbable