Great books

I am a few pages from finish reading a book called "Ancestor's Tale" by Richard Dawkins, 2004.

The first book I read from Dr. Dawkins was also his first: The Selfish Gene. I was 17, just got admission into the Zoology department of NTU, and I thought I fully understood the essence of Darwinism. That book blew my mind. Now I look back I realized how lucky I was to start my real scientific reading with this book, a book I basically "bumped into" when I wandered around in the library of Northwestern University in Evanston.

At the time I kind of assumed the author was either dead or very very old. After all, Darwin is dead for more than 100 years and you would assume a pop science book explaining an idea as old as evolution to be old too. At the time I didn't know there's still people studying the evolutionary theories, like I didn't think anyone in physics are still studying Newton's Law. Coming from a largely non-Christian country and an extremely atheist family, I didn't realize that there are much more educated people in the world who still believed in Creation.

The first Creationist I knew and the only one I know well (you'd wonder why) was a close friend of mine in junior high. We fought with each other physically in kindergarten, lost contact for six years in different classes in elementary school, and met again in junior high. She came from a Christian family and she was never very interested in science or biology, so I guess I never took her opinions too seriously on the matter of Darwin. You can't blame someone who doesn't believe in Darwin because they never had a chance to judge him with fairness. Even when I was having those heated debates with her, I didn't realize that her point of view is the religious point of view that is share by many, many others. At the time I just thought she was not informed. I suppose it is okay for people to be not informed at age 15 on stuff like this.

A few years later when I read the Selfish Gene, this friend of mine has become more and more devoted to the Church. After college she became some sort of a missionary and we eventually lost contact. Now I looked back, I wish I had made her read the book. It could have changed her decisions, which in my value system would be a good thing.

About two years after I read the Selfish Gene, I read a book translated as "The Great Extinction" in Chinese. The book tells a really fascinating tale of how the dinosaurs became extinct, with lots of interdisciplinatory information. Unfortunately, toward the end of the book, the author attacked Darwin,"Survival of the fittest is a tautology". I think that was a clever attack, since if you only take that phrase and define what fittest is, it does mean the one who survived and reproduced. The point is, Darwinism is not a phrase. Darwinism is a mechanism that could explain how the various species arose. Under the prerequisite of Darwinism, speciation simply could not be avoided (inevitable is different from being tautologic). The phrase survival of the fittest is just a way of describing things so that human being could grasp the idea without having to devote a year or two studying. The logic of Darwinism is so solid that it always surprised me when creationists tried to attack the idea from the logic angle. It's kind of like trying to defeat Andy Roddick in serving speed.

If you are a Creationist and you want to show us Darwinians that Darwinism is wrong, let me tell you how. Go and study the organisms, living or dead, and find a trait that absolutely could not have arisen from evolution in the Darwinian way. This has to be a trait that nobody on earth could think of a way for evolution to do it. Then we might consider another theory which is compatible with all the existent data and this new trait. Unfortunately, I'm afraid we Darwinians will never agree to a Creationist's point of view. That is a theory that could never be disproved and is therefore unscientific not worth wasting time thinking about unless the God in question agrees to show us how it was done.

Back to the books. After college I found the sequel to "the Selfish Gene", "The Extended Phenotype". This book is aimed at a somewhat more informed audience regarding evolutionary biology. Unfortunately I lent the book to somebody and I can't remember who it was.

The discovery of the Ancestor's Tale in a Berkeley book store was a pleasant surprise. I didn't know Dr. Dawkins was still around (I still don't know how old he is, but I used to think he is in the same generation as Huxley the novelist). This book starts at the present human race and traces back the phylogenetic tree. This book is meant for the general public; however, as a postdoc in molecular biology, I have to admit that many of the tales in this book still taught me important lessons in science. I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the history of our race. This is a beautifully written book as the other two Dawkins books I have read. I wonder, why the Nobel prize in literature never goes to people who wrote such books? Why is scientific literature not considered real literature? Isn't it harder to make science interesting to the general public? Furthermore, isn't it more beneficial to the human race to write something like the Selfish Gene than a book of fiction?

After all, I just wanted to say: Dawkins's books changed my view of life, in a very good way.