Reddit reviews Climbing Mount Improbable

It's never all or nothing! Check out Climbing Mount Improbable for an in-depth look at how these sorts of interconnected adaptations could come about through natural selection.

I can think of a few

• Paul Kennedy's "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" - WHY and how whole empires fall
  
  
• Niall Ferguson's "The Ascent of Money" - How money rules the world - here's how.
  
  
• Jarred Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel" - his thesis might not be entirely correct - but it's a VERY fair look at how our history was influenced by these factors.
  
  
• Bruce Bueno De Mesquita's - "The Predictioneer's Game" - - How quantitative models are SCARILY accurate
  
  
• Emanuel Derman's "Models Behaving Badly" - And how sometimes quantitative models are totally wrong.
  
  
• Paul Roberts - "The End of Oil" - Probably the most serious and balanced read on what could be one of the most important economic problems facing our modern civilization in the next 20 years.
  
  
• Frank & Cook's "Winner Take All Society" - and why things are a problem.
  
  
• Richard Florida's "The Great Reset" - Florida is a pretty good author all around - far better than some others in the pitch.
  
  
• James Bamford's amazing "Body of Secrets" - Not all our enemies are external, and sometimes our allies turn out to actually be thuggish & deadly enemies.
  
  
• Iris Chang's "The Rape of Nanking" - Nobody here is exactly as they appear.
  
  
• Carl Sagan's "A Demon Haunted World"
  
  
• Robin Marantz Henig's "A Monk in the Garden" - Yeah - the priest that proved Darwin's theory, in 1865.....oh yeah and he invented statistics along the way.
  
  
• Brian Sykes' "The seven Daughters of Eve"
  
  
• Douglas Hofstadter's "Metamagical Themas" - Every page is practically amazing - a collection of amazing old articles from Dr. H's work
  
  
• Kristina Borjesson's edit of "Into the Buzzsaw" - the hard truth about a couple of things in the US media
  
  
• Richard Dawkins' "Climbing Mount Improbable" - a great work about such an amazing idea.
  
  
• Kim Sterelny's "Dawkins vs. Gould" - this is a REAL debate about evolution!
  

If he's already familiar with atheism, and with evolution, but seems stuck on the issue of probability, I'd suggest referring him to Richard Dawkins' Climbing Mount Improbable. It is, of course, written for a popular audience rather than a purely scientific one, but I think it should get the point across.

Overviews of the evidence:

The greatest show on earth

Why evolution is true

Books on advanced evolution:

The selfish gene

The extended phenotype

Climbing mount improbable

The ancestors tale

It is hard to find a better author than Dawkins to explain evolutionary biology. Many other popular science books either don't cover the details or don't focus entirely on evolution.

I will hit one point though.

>I have a hard time simply jumping from natural adaption or mutation or addition of information to the genome, etc. to an entirely different species.

For this you should understand two very important concepts in evolution. The first is a reproductive barrier. Basically as two populations of a species remain apart from each other (in technical terms we say there is no gene flow between them) then repoductive barriers becomes established. These range in type. There are behavioral barriers, such as certain species of insects mating at different times of the day from other closely related species. If they both still mated at the same time then they could still produce viable offspring. Other examples of behavior would be songs in birds (females will only mate with males who sing a certain way). There can also be physical barriers to reproduction, such as producing infertile offspring (like a donkey and a horse do) or simply being unable to mate (many bees or flies have different arrangements of their genitalia which makes it difficult or impossible to mate with other closely related species. Once these barriers exist then the two populations are considered two different species. These two species can now further diverge from each other.

The second thing to understand is the locking in of important genes. Evolution does not really take place on the level of the individual as most first year biology courses will tell you. It makes far more sense to say that it takes place on the level of the gene (read the selfish gene and the extended phenotype for a better overview of this). Any given gene can have a mutation that is either positive, negative, of neutral. Most mutations are neutral or negative. Let's say that a certain gene has a 85% chance of having a negative mutation, a 10% chance of a neutral mutation, and a 5% chance of a positive mutation. This gene is doing pretty good, from it's viewpoint it has an 85% chance of 'surviving' a mutation. What is meant by this is that even though one of it's offspring may have mutated there is an 85% chance that the mutated gene will perform worse than it and so the mutation will not replace it in the gene pool. If a neutral mutation happens then this is trouble for the original gene, because now there is a gene that does just as good a job as it in the gene pool. At this point random fluctuations of gene frequency called genetic drift take over the fate of the mutated gene (I won't go into genetic drift here but you should understand it if you want to understand evolution).

The last type of mutation, a positive mutation is what natural selection acts on. This type of mutation would also change the negative/neutral/positive mutation possibilities. so the newly positively mutated gene might have frequencies of 90/7/3 Already it has much better odds than the original gene. OK, one more point before I explain how this all ties together. Once a gene has reached the 100/0/0 point it does not mean that gene wins forever, there can still be mutations in other genes that affect it. A gene making an ant really good at flying doesn't matter much when the ant lives in tunnels and bites off its own wings, so that gene now has altered percentages in ants. It is this very complex web that makes up the very basics of mutations and how they impact evolution (if you are wondering how common mutations are I believe they happen about once every billion base pairs, so every human at conception has on average 4 mutations that were not present in either parent)

This all ties back together by understanding that body plan genes (called hox genes) lock species into their current body plans, by reducing the number of possible positive or neutral mutations they become crucial to the organisms survival. As evolutionary time progresses these genes become more and more locked in, meaning that the body plans of individuals become more and more locked in. So it is no wonder that coming in so late to the game as we are we see such diversity in life and we never see large scale form mutations. Those type of mutations became less likely as the hox genes became locked in their comfy spots on the unimpeachable end of the mutation probability pool. That is why it is hard to imagine one species evolving into another, and why a creationist saying that they will believe evolution when a monkey gives birth to a human is so wrong.

Hopefully I explained that well, it is kind of a dense subject and I had to skip some things I would rather have covered.

"The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins. Dawkins doesn't really go into anything new or original, but the strength of the book is that is a great, concise summary of all the beginning arguments for atheism.

http://www.amazon.com/God-Delusion-Richard-Dawkins/dp/0618680004

I'd follow it with Daniel Dennett's "Breaking the Spell", also a good recommendation. Same goes for Carl Sagan's "A Demon Haunted World"

http://www.amazon.com/Breaking-Spell-Religion-Natural-Phenomenon/dp/0143038338

http://www.amazon.com/Demon-Haunted-World-Science-Candle-Dark/dp/0345409469/

Christopher Hitchens is a bit vitriolic for some, but "God is not Great" has some nuggets in it.

http://www.amazon.com/God-Not-Great-Religion-Everything/dp/0446579807/

I personally didn't like Sam Harris' "End of Faith" but I did like his "Letter to a Christian Nation".

http://www.amazon.com/Letter-Christian-Nation-Vintage-Harris/dp/0307278778/

For the topic of evolution, Talk Origins is great (and free) http://toarchive.org/
Dawkin's "The Selfish Gene" is also a good read (and short). Not so short but also good are Dawkins' "Blind Watchmaker", "Climbing Mount Improbable" and "Unweaving the Rainbow"

http://www.amazon.com/Selfish-Gene-Anniversary-Introduction/dp/0199291152/

http://www.amazon.com/Blind-Watchmaker-Evidence-Evolution-Universe/dp/0393315703/

http://www.amazon.com/Climbing-Mount-Improbable-Richard-Dawkins/dp/0393316823/

http://www.amazon.com/Unweaving-Rainbow-Science-Delusion-Appetite/dp/0618056734/

Pretty much yes. Really he is argueing that some things are so irreducibly complex that they had to be designed. Except that they are not. Eye evolution has been understood for a very long time. And we have even found organisms with all sorts of eyes, at all sorts of stages. Dawkin's Climbing Mount Imporbable Address this argument in some detail.

But really this ends up being a race. Every so often ID proponents go and find a new something and aay "Ha this is irreducibly complex". Then biologists come along and show that it is reducable, and the process repeats with ever increasingly obsure examples being proposed and falsified. Meanwhile less informed apoligsts just keep refering to the eye or the Bacterial Flegelum and pretend that its evolution is still not understood, because they don't understand it.

> It's like you and me have to race up this mountain side

Mountain climbing is actually a good metaphor for evolution, and natural selection is very good at climbing mountains. I recommend Richard Dawkins' book "Climbing Mount Improbable" if you'd like to understand how natural selection drives adaptation of species to their environment. You can also find a good overview of how natural selection climbs mountains here on Wikipedia.

What do you mean by Darwinian Evolution?

Most people are sold on evolution based gradual model; where things like the human eye - which are very complex - can evolve if there are many, many tiny steps over millions and millions of years. . Not just tiny improvements all the time, but twists, turns, dead-ends and etc. Richard Dawkins book Climbing Mount Improbable Gives a great overview of this how the seemingly design of living things really isn't.

And it was only those "Crazy Christian Creationists" talked about gaps in the fossil record. They didn't know what they were talking about.....until 1972.

That's when Niles Eldridge and Stephen J Gould were tracing the evolution of trilobites and lands snails; most of the fossil record showed no change through millions of years of strata. That's right, most species are stable for millions of years and then change so rapidly that we rarely if ever see it in the fossil record. see Punctuated Equilibrium

What happens in Punctuated Equilibrium, you see, is that a small sub-population of a species will evolve; gain such an advantage they will take over, the main population dies, and is fossilized thus making it appear that there was no transitions. But.... there is no fossil evidence for it as the theory admits.

So which Darwinian Evolutionary theory are you speaking about when you ask about having secular scientific arguments against them?

Gradualistic evolution isn't supported by the fossil record and neither is Punctuated Equilibrium.

This was beautifully described and explained by Richard Dawkins in the last chapter of his book Climbing Mount Improbable

I think you mean Climbing Mount Improbable

In any case, yes - the theory of evolution has evolved over time. Darwin didn't have the knowledge of biology (and especially biochemistry) that modern biologists do.

The basic concepts of Darwinian evolution - random variation in populations, natural selection, and speciation over time - are still the same, though.

IMO, if you're interested in philosophy, your first port of call should be to get an understanding of evolution. It's surprisingly relevant to so many topics in philosophy, and I think so many misunderstandings that occur in philosophy come from not really appreciating an evolutionary viewpoint. There's sure to be quite a few people who'd disagree with me on this.

I'd recommend these books, all of which are quite readable and have a somewhat philosophic bent:

Climbing Mount Improbable or The Blind Watchmaker
by Richard Dawkins

Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Daniel C. Dennett