Finished reading River out of Eden yesterday. The book is about evolutionary biology and uses the 'River of DNA' as a metaphor. Now that might sound heavy, but Dawkins knows perfectly how to make it all interesting and understandable to a lay reader. So we get to know about Darwin's encounter with the ichneumon wasp (which changed his life), how the dance of the honeybee (which the worker bee uses to tell her companions where the food is) might have evolved, how nearly two billion years ago bacteria took residence inside our cells (mitochondria) and how very much important they are to us now, and many other things. The discussion of Fisher's theory of Sex ratios is also illuminating (e.g. why a beehive has hundreds/thousands of drones and just one (or a few) queen(s). Personal observation: Bees seem to be a favorite of biologists :-). And packs all this in just 188 pages (one of the best information densities I've seen and something that all writers can learn from). Go ahead, read it.
No comments:
Post a Comment