A Devil’s Chaplain
Now I’ve decided that I’ll bore my imaginary readers by discussing every book that I read that I find worth mentioning.
A Devil’s Chaplain by Richard Dawkins is one of the most interesting and thought-provoking books I’ve read in a while. It is a collection of essays, mostly about evolution. Before I forget, I’ll mention three ideas from the book that I found interesting.
First, let me say that I like analogies that compare unfamiliar things like atoms to the size of the Earth (for example, what would be the size of a mole (6.02E23 particles) if each particle were the size of a marble? It would be of the order of 1000 km wide…). Dawkins applied this kind of trick to evolution: if you stand next to your father, and he next to your grandfather, etc. (imagining that all your ancestors were alive, of course), you would be standing 300 miles from the ancestor that we share with chimpanzees. Not as far as one would imagine! Millions of years are not a tangible thing, but 300 miles are.
Second, I found interesting that the author declared that while he believes that evolution is the way nature works, that doesn’t mean that we humans have to work that way: he is Darwinian when it comes to science, but anti-Darwinian when it comes to society. For example, whenever we use contraception appropriately we are “fighting evolution", and that is the Right Thing To Do.
Third, I liked a “paradox” that was discussed in the book. Has evolution itself changed over time? Some people argue that in the Old Times (Cambric period, I think it was) new kingdoms and phyla were created. Nowadays, we only get new species! Dawkins suggested that the confusion comes from applying the classification of modern species to ancient ones. In those times, when the phyla split, they were “only species” as well. He likened the situation with that of a gardener discussing a tree, saying “when the tree was young, new branches were formed. Now we only get twigs!".
