A River Out of Eden - Richard Dawkins > Reviews > River out of Eden - Richard Dawkins

Author's product rating:   

Degree of Information	Medium
How interesting was the book?	Mildly stimulating
How useful was it?	Pretty useful
Would you read it again?	Probably not
Value for money	Satisfactory

Advantages:	Accessible and easy to read
Disadvantages:	Short and adds nothing to his earlier works

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

A River out of Eden - Richard Dawkins
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Professo r Richard Dawkins is one of the worlds leading authorities on evolution and gene theory and a staunch anti-creationist thinker. He first came to public attention with his critically acclaimed 1976 book 'The Selfish Gene', a fairly controversial book in that it espouses the gene as the ultimate currency of life and consigned everything else as merely vehicles to be used for their ongoing survival.

In later books such as 'The Blind Watchmaker' and 'The Extended Phenotype' he revisited these themes and expanded the arguments, often confronting earlier challenges to his work as well as long held religious and social beliefs. Although you are likely to find these books in the Popular Science sections of bookshops they are equally at home on degree level reading lists and contain a level of scientific content that can be somewhat challenging for the average reader. What raises these books above the norm is Dawkins skill as a written communicator. His books are full of accessible exposition and analogies and the reader is never made to feel distanced from the subject matter, for such a highly regarded intellectual writing about his life's work this is some achievement.

Despite their undeniable accessibility these books would still be off putting to many so as an easier entry to his theories Dawkins has produced 'A River out of Eden'. A book that covers many of the themes of his earlier work, but eases up on the science parts leaving the reader with an understanding of what he is proposing but without having to wade through the detailed evidence.

The river of the title is Dawkins' metaphor for the flow of DNA from our earliest ancestors to all living things today. Just as a river will have many outlets to the sea, as you trace them back you will see them merging in an unbroken line towards a common source. To be honest, Dawkins stretches this metaphor to the limit in the early chapters and goes further to compare the DNA flow to digital information flow along an optical fibre. DNA replication works over millions of generations because the information stored within the DNA is digital rather than analogue and therefore maintains its integrity. The analogy he uses is photocopying a sheet of text, where you continue to copy the copy until pretty quickly it becomes an unreadable mess. With digital replication the errors are negligible, they still occur of course which is where evolution comes in, but for the vast majority of the time the integrity of the original is kept. Returning to the river metaphor, just as a single optical fibre can carry many individual streams of information without corruption so the DNA river can carry many DNA streams within its banks. Like I say, he's had to work hard to shoehorn his theory into the river context but I suspect it's just that he was really keen on getting the biblical Eden reference into the title, if only as a bit of a laugh.

Natural selection, survival of the fittest and selfish genes are all variations on the theories that Dawkins writes about, and a lot of his discussion centres on the idea of being successful. For a gene, or a species, or an individual to be successful in these terms means that they have reached a level of maturity from where they can reproduce and pass on their genes to the next generation. In the early chapters we are thus presented with a statement that is bewildering in its implication yet blindingly obvious and totally undeniable. Every living organism around today, every organism that has ever lived can state with complete confidence that every single one of its ancestors successfully reached adulthood and produced at least one child, without exception. Every living organism can therefore trace its ancestral history all the way back to the earliest primordial life form. That is the river of DNA and that is Dawkins' River out of Eden.

This is pretty powerful stuff and the rest of the book expands and explains these ideas further without ever becoming heavy or unwieldy. That makes this book a great access point for those looking for a gentle introduction to evolutionary theory, but it is also one of its drawbacks. There is nothing really new in this book and he isn't saying anything he hasn't already recorded in the books I've mentioned at the beginning of this review. As I've also said, Dawkins is a very gifted communicator and if books such as the Selfish Gene can veer towards the overly technical they are always understandable from a generalist perspective and are always readable.

It is for that reason that I was rather disappointed by this book and why I would find it hard to recommend it. Anyone really interested in the subject should take the plunge and read 'The Selfish Gene'.