Dawkins’ books are always a bit hit and miss because they’re pitched at different intellectual levels. This is the 7th Dawkins book that I have read and I would say it’s a middling one that challenges Paley’s Blind Watchmaker analogy and thus, once you get used to his pompous style, can discover informative information to expand your understanding of evolution and natural selection. Whilst Dawkins can be overly conversational and patronising he does guide the reader through his arguments in a successful way. I particularly enjoyed learning about the evolution of echolocation and how he provided alternative theories to the ones proposed in The Selfish Gene, such as the ‘inorganic mineral’ theory instead of the ‘primeval soup’ one, which I had naively assumed was the only one to explain the emergence of self-replicating genes. Dawkins expands on the theory of cumulative selection, which was alluded to in The Selfish Gene when using the rowboat analogy, and places greater emphasis on mutations and their contribution to evolution. I also enjoyed Dawkins’ discussion of the rate of evolution and his comparison of gradualists and punctuationalists: an expansion of the arms race theory, the question of whether there is a resistance to evolutionary change, whether there are periods of stasis or it is just super-slow continuous evolutionary change, whether the speed is variable and if change is reversible. His discussions into taxonomy were also interesting, as he explains the impact of an incomplete fossil record in demonstrating discrete and distinct species which actually may have been a continuum of evolutionary gradualist changes but there is no record of such, and how divergent species can be unrelated and yet share similar characteristics such that they are classified incorrectly as being related to each other. Goodreads 3/5 stars.
