 River Out of Eden A Darwinian View of Life Written and Read by Richard Dawkins 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. These lines, by Pete Hine, capture 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 this book is to accord due recognition to the inspirational quality of our modern understanding of Darwinian life. There is more poetry in Mita Condriel 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 onto the future. My river is a river of DNA flowing, and opposite to a real river, 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. In one way or another all my books have been devoted to expounding and exploring the almost limitless power of the Darwinian principle. Power unleashed whenever and wherever there is enough time for the consequences of primordial self-replication to unfold. River Out of Eden continues this mission. Sample complete. Ready to continue?