
anthropology, biology, cognitive sciences, ethology, climate, evolution, brains, language, the future -- not to mention Patrick O'Brian novels and the Science Masters series.
You can click on the topics to see a collection of favorite books on the subject.
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Richard Dawkins, Climbing Mount Improbable (Norton, 1996). -
"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?" [p.75]
"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." [p.326]
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Richard Dawkins, River
Out of Eden (Science Masters, BasicBooks, 1995).-
"Never say, and never take seriously anybody who says, `I cannot believe that so-and-so could have evolved by gradual selection.' I have dubbed this kind of fallacy `the Argument from Personal Incredulity.' Time and again, it has proved the prelude to an intellectual banana-skin experience."
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Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe
Without Design (Norton, 1986). -
"I want to inspire the reader with a vision of our own existence as, on the face of it, a spine-chilling mystery; and simultaneously to convey the full excitement of the fact that it is a mystery with an elegant solution which is within our grasp... A good case can be made that Darwinism is true, not just on this planet but all over the universe wherever life may be found."
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Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene (Oxford UP, 1982). -
"Any suggestion that the child's mathematical ineptitude might have a genetic origin is likely to be greeted with something approaching despair: if it is in the genes "it is written", it is "determined" and nothing can be done about it; you might as well give up attempting to teach the child mathematics. This is pernicious rubbish on an almost astrological scale. Genetic causes and environmental causes are in principle no different from each other. Some influences of both types may be hard to reverse, others may be easy."
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Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford UP, 1976). -
"Our genes may be immortal but the collection of genes which is any one of us is bound to crumble away. Elizabeth II is a direct descendant of William the Conqueror. Yet it is quite probable that she bears not a single one of the old king's genes. We should not seek immortality in reproduction.
But if you contribute to the world's culture, if you have a good idea, compose a tune, invent a sparking plug, write a poem, it may live on, intact, long after your genes have dissolved in the common pool. Socrates may or may not have a gene or two alive in the world today... but who cares? The [cultural contributions] of Socrates, Leonardo, Copernicus, and Marconi are still going strong."
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Adrian Desmond, Huxley: From Devil's Disciple to Evolution's High Priest (Addison-Wesley, 1997).- James R. Kincaid, in the New York Times Book Review, said: "One thing will probably strike American readers, even in the midst of their delight: Desmond will
seem vastly to overstate the fullness of Huxley's victory, the triumph of secular agnosticism and
scientific rationalism. Is our modern world Huxley's? I don't know how it is in Desmond's England,
but the contemporary United States seems to me about as skeptical, scientific and agnostic as a
10th-century tribe of frog-worshipers. We need Huxley back again, debating Pat Robertson, the head of the Promise Keepers and a worthy representative of the Church of Scientology, say John
Travolta."
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