Читать онлайн «River Out of Eden»
Автор Ричард Докинз
Richard Dawkins
River Out Of Eden
© 1995
ILLUSTRATIONS BY LALLA WARD
To the memory of
Henry Colyear Dawkins (1921-1992),
Fellow of St. John's College, Oxford:
a master of the art of making things clear.
And a river went out of Eden to water the garden.
PREFACE
Nature, it seems, is the popular name
For milliards and milliards and milliards
Of particles playing their infinite game
Of billiards and billiards and billiards.
– Piet Hein
Piet Hein captures the classically pristine world of physics. But when the ricochets of atomic billiards chance to put together an object that has a certain, seemingly innocent property, something momentous happens in the universe. That property is an ability to self-replicate; that is, the object is able to use the surrounding materials to make exact copies of itself, including replicas of such minor flaws in copying as may occasionally arise. What will follow from this singular occurrence, anywhere in the universe, is Darwinian selection and hence the baroque extravaganza that, on this planet, we call life. Never were so many facts explained by so few assumptions. Not only does the Darwinian theory command superabundant power to explain.
Its economy in doing so has a sinewy elegance, a poetic beauty that outclasses even the most haunting of the world's origin myths. One of my purposes in writing this book has been to accord due recognition {xii} to the inspirational quality of our modern understanding of Darwinian life. There is more poetry in Mitochondrial Eve than in her mythological namesake.The feature of life that, in David Hume's words, most “ravishes into admiration all men who have ever contemplated it” is the complex detail with which its mechanisms – the mechanisms that Charles Darwin called “organs of extreme perfection and complication” – fulfill an apparent purpose. The other feature of earthly life that impresses us is its luxuriant diversity: as measured by estimates of species numbers, there are some tens of millions of different ways of making a living. Another of my purposes is to convince my readers that “ways of making a living” is synonymous with “ways of passing DNA-coded texts on to the future. ” My “river” is a river of DNA, flowing and branching through geological time, and the metaphor of steep banks confining each species' genetic games turns out to be a surprisingly powerful and helpful explanatory device.
