Not too long and not too lumbered with detail, it takes the reader through genes, DNA and natural selection - via African Eve and blindfolded bees - in a beautifully-written account peppered with anecdotes and various mind-boggling facts and figures that will explain just enough to inspire you to read more. However if you're not too familiar with evolution but keen to delve into Dawkins' scientific titles - perhaps you've only previously read the God Delusion - then I recommend going for this one. If you have already read several other Dawkins' titles - The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, etc - then you may find this adds little to what you already know. As Dawkins reminds us, nature is neither cruel nor kind, only "pitilessly indifferent" - but when you understand how it works, its genius is positively awe-inspiring. It's one of several tragic anecdotes used to make an important point, and the kind of jolt that Dawkins does best. With a nervous system programmed to kill anything that moves near its young unless it emits a babies cry, a deaf mother turkey mistakes her children for predators and, in a bid to protect them, ends up massacring every last one. There is a point in River Out of Eden when the stark brutality of nature really hits home. While not as good as say, The Selfish Gene, this book still remains an engaging read and is quite commendable to people who haven’t read the three previous books that I first mentioned in the beginning. The way Richard Dawkins is able to communicate his opinions and transmit science to the reader remains on the same level as in some of his other works. In the end, this is a short and very well written book. It’s a powerful message (much more eloquently presented in the book than here) and I found it to be a particularly successful one. This river started its flow with the first ever organism and has since then branched into the many different life forms and domains that we now see all around us. He writes about a river of genes, flowing since the emergence of life on Earth. The title of this book is related to the analogy Richard Dawkins uses in the first chapter. And while Richard Dawkins tells us that nature is neither cruel nor kind, only pitilessly indifferent, his writing clearly isn’t, remaining compelling throughout the whole book. So, having only read The Selfish Gene, I naturally thought it might be a good idea to read this book. It has also been estimated that the surviving species constitute about 1 percent of the species that have ever lived.”īefore reading River Out of Eden, I had read that it was basically a mixture of the ideas Dawkins first presented in The Selfish Gene, then in The Blind Watchmaker and finally in The Extended Phenotype. “There are now perhaps thirty million branches to the river of DNA, for that is an estimate of the number of species on earth.
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