2156) Darwinism is not a theory of random chance. It is a theory of random mutation plus non-random cumulative natural selection. [...] It is grindingly, creakingly, crashingly obvious that, if Darwinism was really a theory of chance, it couldn't work. You don't need to be a mathematician or physicist to calculate that an eye or a haemoglobin molecule would take from here to infinity to self-assemble by sheer higgledy-piggledy luck. Far from being a difficulty peculiar to Darwinism, the astronomic improbability of eyes and knees, enzymes and elbow joints and the other living wonders is precisely the problem that any theory of life must solve, and that Darwinism uniquely does solve. It solves it by breaking the improbability up into small, manageable parts, smearing out the luck need going round the back of Mount Improbable and crawling up the gentle slopes, inch by million-year inch.

Richard Dawkins
Climbing Mount Improbable (1996)

2157) I looked at one of the discarded [elephant] trunks and wondered how many millions of years it must have taken to create such a miracle of evolution. Equipped with fifty thousand muscles and controlled by a brain to match such complexity, it can wrench and push with tonnes of force. Yet, at the same time, it is capable of performing the most delicate operations such as plucking a small seed-pod to pop in the mouth. This versatile organ is a siphon capable of holding four litres of water to be drunk or sprayed over the body, as an extended finger and as a trumpet or loud speaker.

The trunk has social functions, too; caresses, sexual advances, reassurances, greetings and mutually intertwining hugs; and among males it can become a weapon for beating and grappling like wrestlers when tusks clash and each bull seeks to dominate in play or in earnest. And there I lay, amputated like so many elephant trunks I had seen all over Africa.

Iain and Oria Douglas-Hamilton
Battle for the Elephants (1992)
quoted by Richard Dawkins in
Climbing Mount Improbable (1996)

[Note: Cf. #685 Pinker]

2158) However many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead.

Richard Dawkins
The Blind Watchmaker (1986)
quoted by Richard Dawkins in
Climbing Mount Improbable (1996)

2159) [Natural selection] has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.

Richard Dawkins
The Blind Watchmaker (1986)

2160) There is a supremely banal reason why transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level. [...] [Z]oologists always insist on classifying a specimen as in one species or another. If a specimen is intermediate in actual form (as many are) zoologists' legalistic conventions still force them to jump one way or the other when naming it. Therefore creationists' claim that there are no intermediates has to be true by definition at the species level, but it has no implications about the real world - only implications about zoologists' naming conventions.

Richard Dawkins
Climbing Mount Improbable (1996)

2161) To a first approximation all animal species fly.

Richard Dawkins
Climbing Mount Improbable (1996)

[Note: This is a modification of an aphorism by Robert May: see #103 May and #102 Lewin.]

2162) It cannot be said too often that Darwinian theory does not allow for [species'] getting temporarily worse in quest of a long-term goal.

Richard Dawkins
Climbing Mount Improbable (1996)

2163) All questions about life have the same answer (though it may not always be a helpful one): natural selection.

Dr. Henry Bennet-Clark
quoted by Richard Dawkins in
Climbing Mount Improbable (1996)

2164) The attitude that living things are placed here for our benefit still dominates our culture, even when its underpinnings have disappeared. We now need, for purposes of scientific understanding, to find a less human-centered view of the natural world. If wild animals and plants can be said to be put into the world for any purpose - and there is a respectable figure of speech by which they can - it surely is not for the benefit of humans. We must learn to see things through non-human eyes. [...] Marginally more defensible [is] the idea that [flowers and animals] are placed in the world for the benefit of others with whom they have a naturally evolved mutualism: flowers for the benefit of bees, bees for the benefit of flowers, acacia bullhorns for the benefit of ants and their ants for the benefit of acacias. But this notion of creatures being "for the good" of other creatures is in peril of reductio ad absurdum. We must have no truck with the pop ecologists's fallacy, the holisty grail of all individuals striving for the good of the community, the ecosystem, 'Gaia'.

Richard Dawkins
Climbing Mount Improbable (1996)

2165) Flowers and elephants are "for" the same thing as everything else in the living kingdoms, for spreading Duplicate Me programs written in DNA language. Flowers are for spreading copies of instructions for making more flowers. Elephants are for spreading copies of instructions for making more elephants. Birds are for spreading copies of instructions for making more birds. [...] The DNA of an elephant constitutes a gigantic program, analogous to a computer program. Like the virus DNA it is fundamentally a Duplicate Me program, but it contains an almost fantastically large digression as an essential part of the efficient execution of its fundamental message. That digression is an elephant. The program says "Duplicate me by the roundabout route of building an elephant first." The elephant feeds as to grow; it grows so as to become an adult; it become an adult so as to mate and reproduce new elephants; it reproduces new elephants to propagate new copies of its original program instructions.

Richard Dawkins
Climbing Mount Improbable (1996)