Nos encontramos aquí en los altos y al parecer inabordables riscos de un supuesto monte, el Monte Improbable. Sus cimas representan, para Richard Dawkins, la combinación de perfección e improbabilidad que cualquiera puede encontrar en los seres vivos. Desde la conjunción de fuerza y sensibilidad de la trompa de un elefante hasta el camuflaje vital de una hormiga escarabajo, el mundo viviente está poblado de criaturas que parecen milagrosamente «diseñadas» para la vida que llevan, criaturas todas ellas que parecen haber alcanzado su punto óptimo, la cúspide imposible. Gracias a Dawkins comprobamos que estos complejos y brillantes rasgos no se han conseguido por casualidad -lo que equivaldría a escalar con un simple salto la cara escarpada, cortada a pico, de la montaña-, sino por una evolución acumulativa y gradual -que representa la pausada y larga senda que asciende a la cumbre-, infinitamente lenta para los parámetros de la historia humana. Para ello, Dawkins conduce al lector a través de los espectaculares paisajes montañosos del mundo natural y nos invita a visitar, por ejemplo, el fascinante mundo de las telas de araña o a contemplar los higos como sifueran un jardín para una concurridísima colonia de insectos. Ya en en sus libros anteriores, Richard Dawkins ha revelado la gloriosa variedad y la unidad que subyace en la vida sobre la Tierra. En Escalando el Monte Improbable contagia al lector su pasión por la interminable variedad y adaptabilidad de los genes y sus asombrosas consecuencias, ofreciéndonos una atractiva y erudita descripción de muy variados fenómenos biológicos para los que propone explicaciones sencillas.

I wanted to understand evolution better and this book delivered. ( )

I don't really need Dawkins to persuade me that Darwinian evolution is an amazingly powerful idea (...or if I did, he already did the job forty years ago), but there's still a lot of pleasure in following his devastatingly clear explanations of some of the more unexpected places where it can lead us.

In this book, Dawkins looks at a selection of topics including the design of spider-webs, the possible shapes of shells, and the surprisingly complex sex-life of figs, as well as going in depth into two of the areas that are regularly held up as too complex to have "evolved by chance": vision and flight. The objections of Mrs Darwin and more recent doubters are rapidly dealt with, as Dawkins sets out the convincing evidence that both have developed many times, independently, in different parts of the evolutionary tree, and to many different levels of sophistication, and shows how even something as complex as the camera-eye we have nowadays could have developed through a series of quite plausible intermediate stages.

As in The blind watchmaker, there is a lot of reference to experiments with computer-simulations of evolutionary processes done by himself and other researchers, and Dawkins doesn't try to hide the limitations of such simulations, which can only assess the success of a mutation in terms of arbitrary pre-defined rules, whilst in the real world such mutations may (or, more likely, may not) turn out to overcome problems that we could only define with hindsight.

In his penultimate chapter, Dawkins tries to show us what an amazing thing life is, by setting out some of the challenges we would have to overcome to create an artificial system with the same properties. One of the pre-requisites, he tells us, would be a clearly impracticable machine he calls a "3D-printer", which would be able to create copies of actual physical components under the instructions of computer code. Not much more than twenty years later, I have such a machine on my desk...

As others have said, Dawkins is less enjoyable to read than he could be because of his constant and sometimes rather strident diatribes against the straw-men who are trying to confound him with silly, weak arguments against evolution. In the privileged environment of the printed page it's easy to start doubting that these straw-men actually exist (or, if they do, that anyone actually takes them seriously), and we often rather wish he would just get on with telling us about the science. But of course they do exist, they ignore scientific arguments, and Dawkins clearly sees it as part of his duty as a public communicator of science to warn us against them. ( )

The Mount Improbable of the title is the probability of life evolving. Dawkin's demonstrates very eloquently exactly how life managed to climb that mountain of improbability. ( )

Less 'preachy' than "The Blind Watchmaker", it contains in-depth discussions of the plausible evolution of several complex systems (wings, eyes) and of general mechanisms that could drive the co-evolution of body structures (shell morphology, embriology). A good book to put in the hands of an intelligent teen ager and a very good read for an interested adult. Still missing, I find, is a good sense of the methods of the science which Dawkins expounds on. Dawkins shows you the (likely) solution, but not the details of the methods used to obtain it. It makes you want to get into this branch of science but doesn't show you what are the steps you need to take to do so. ( )