Review -- "River Out of Eden;" Richard Dawkins

"River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life" (BasicBooks, 1995) is Richard Dawkins' fourth book and third for the general public. Although it's his shortest book, Dawkins still exhibits enough examples to not only show why evolution is not merely a theory, but why he's one of the UK's leading scientists. If he wasn't an atheist, he'd probably been knighted by now.

Infused with Dawkins' good humor and tongue-firmly-planted-in-cheek jabs at Creationist colleagues, each chapter is headed with a delicate pen and ink drawling by Lalla Ward (Mrs. Dawkins). Unlike some other of Dawkins' books, this one is laid out in reasonably large font for less strain on the reader's eyes. "River Out of Eden" is book-ended with two lovely metaphors of life on Earth.

The River

Dawkins points out that many people view genealogies of any species (but especially people) as a tree. This is inaccurate because genes tend to merge back and forth in a species history and do not always travel in a straight line. This is why he suggests that life is really more like a river, and that each bit of genetic code is one waterdrop in the river.

This may help us understand more where species branched off. The horse and the donkey, for example, still have branches of the river that travel closely together, so that the water from one can splash into another. Horses and donkeys can interbreed, so their species branched off relatively recently. But horses also share a common ancestor with pigs. Horses can't breed with pigs to produce offspring (and some horses are afraid of pigs - and vice versa). Their branches of the river separated so far ago that they can't splash into each other. But life still flows on.

Voyager Spacecraft

The end of the book theorises about life on other planets. This is because earlier on, Dawkins talked about travelling being one of the main reasons why species need to adapt and why some genes are switched on while others lay dormant. Eventually, if we don't destroy it first, human beings are going to leave Earth.

But they have already, in a way, with the golden disc on the Voyager spacecraft which shows how to get to Earth and a drawing of a naked man and woman with their hands raised in welcome. In this case, Eden is Earth and space is the river and the drawings are Adam and Eve.

Dawkins' Favourite Steed

In "The God Delusion" (2006), Dawkins chides himself for riding off "on my favourite steed, Tangent". Dawkins has vibrant prose but does jump from one topic to the other very quickly. Although the use of footnotes has curbed his tangent-riding a bit, a reader unfamiliar with Dawkins may find his line of reasoning hard to follow. But those used to Dawkins' style will not be bothered.