“The River Out of Eden” Commentary & Summary
A Darwinian View of Life
This book was highly recommended by several individuals that I idolize. To my disillusionment, the book offered very little real-world application. However unapplicable “The River Out of Eden” remained to be remarkably educational and truly enthralling as well. For those curious minds, I do strongly recommend this book as the culmination of Dawkins work squeezed together in an abridged version of 250 some pages.
As I traverse further through my spiritual development journey I find devote atheists’ perspectives rather interesting. I wholeheartedly believe in evolution as an accredited theory that could be verified and empirically tested in various iterations. However, the creation, and thereafter, the following of religion is widely overlooked by militant atheists like Dawkins, Harris, and the other remaining horsemen of atheism (including Krauss, a fave physicist of mine). Religion is used to episodically represent a culture to preserve the predictable nature in human interaction within a tribe, create morality and order when government law is feeble, and inoculate adolescence as they tend towards maturation. Religion also has another benefit regarding affect, assigning meaning to life, and offering a refuge of hope during the resurrection process commonly found in theology.
This book is written to educate and concurrently dissuade the religious belief structure. Although I more closely align with Dawkins perspective on religion I tend to gravitate towards the emotional primordial mind and its subsequent creation of religion through various evolutionary methods.
In Darwin’s natural selection, species can incrementally drift apart, genetically, by various means. Then we experienced multi-level selection, as a hierarchy to evolution. Multi-level selection meant that an organization was superior to an individual. But how do you build cohesive groups with order? Religion, government, and ultimately philosophy.
Anyway, Clinton Richard Dawkins, FRS FRSL (born 26 March 1941) is an English ethologist, evolutionary biologist, and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was the University of Oxford’s Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008 [1]. He is often characterized as one of the horsemen of atheism.
Here is his radical talk on militant atheism.
Summary
The book’s initial premise is that the “purpose” of life is the transmission of DNA down through the generations.
Analysis
I am far from any authority in biology much less evolution. So, my knowledge is limited and thus my ability to properly commentate. So, I will offer a summary with little references back to previous research and
- The Digital River
- All Africa and Her Progenies
- Do Good by Stealth
- God’s Utility Function
- The Replication Bomb
The Digital River
The beginning portion of this chapter was inaugurated with a quote that truly resonated with me. “All [currently] living beings, from humans to protozoa to trees and fungi: ‘Not a single one of our ancestors died in infancy.’”
The deduction is that we have the proper (probabilistically speaking) genes needed to create a lineage of “descendants” and become proper “ancestors”.
The River of DNA, that is our genes, has been represented digitally by Dawkins, vs its analog predecessor. Digital is differentiated from its analog counterpart in the ability to be counted as the values are defined and deterministic. Analog is continuous and infinite (probabilistic).
He selected to analogize the transmission of DNA to the digital transmission of data through the telephone and fax machine. This is something I remember learning about back in the OG days of YouTube. You can upload a video or send a picture over fax one time and still possess similar quality resolution. However, if you are to transmit that data over 10,000 iterations the data will be rendered down to indistinguishable and uncharacterizable noise. The degradation of data would similarly extinguish the production of living biology. The transmission of DNA does not degrade over time as a result of procreation. However, the likely possibility of violation of proper DNA replication can produce errors that contrast from the original set. Another problem with analog is the data is directly derived from the energy source. Anything above a 0 is considered a one. Since digital is defined by a set of finite possible values you can send multiple transmissions of data without the possibility of interference, as commonly observed with telephone communication — in the technology’s infancy.
Furthermore, unlike the binary language, commonly associated with analog, DNA is a base 4-language. Since digital operates based on the encoding digital has the ability to create “words on a book” the same way DNA creates genomes.
It is common knowledge to those who subscribe to the ideology of evolution, that speciation occurs gradually over time. The scale at which the process is executed over timeframes that are unfathomable to common human perspicacity. An elementary understanding of speciation would lead one to know that the process is engendered by a variety of different catalysts. However, Dawkins suggests that the primary cause of speciation occurs when geographical stimuli are introduced. He spent a good portion of the chapter allocated towards the explanation of speciation using the grey and red squirrel as an example.
The transmission of DNA flows through the digital river. When the digital river bifurcates completely, the two streams of data are no longer able to effectively communicate. Similarly, when the speciation process is completed after a millennium or more of gene evolution iterated over each generation the sub-set of animals are still fundamentally identical. However, because of the distinct difference of the data encoded the two may not have the ability to procreate again, or at the minimum produce sterile offspring — even if the animals possess similar physical features like the grey and red squirrel.
All Africa and Her Progenies
This chapter begins with the attack towards mythology and more specifically theology. Dawkins believes that the myth occupies significance determined by sociocultural relevance. His militant like Atheism is obviously evident when he contends with the idea that science is the western version of theology — the myth of creation empirically evolved. His opposition stems from the fact that science, unlike theology, can be empirically tested and replicated over time.
The remaining portion of the chapter is dedicated to the “Out of Africa” theory. Our lineage of ancestors can be called back by 2g where g is the number of generations back from you. However, basic arithmetic would suggest that we had nominal generations separating us from Jesus. We did not take cousins into consideration. This section of the book was rather shocking to me. If we were to walk back the digital river of DNA we would notice that our ancestors we would have 280 generations between Jesus and yourself. The calculations are correct (based on 4 g / century) but the astronomical number is almost impossible to be true. The reason is that we did not account for the interbreeding of cousins (which is surprisingly high). If we trace back our latest most common ancestors using this new truth as an axiom then our ancestors can be traced back no further than the times of “William the Conqueror”, according to Dawkins. He even suggests that our future descendants and their cousins will mean that we can become c0-ancestors within a couple of generations.
Next time you are with a large group of people — say, in a concert hall or at a football match — look around at the audience and reflect upon the following: if you have any descendants at all in the distant future, there are probably people at the same concert whose hands you could shake as co-ancestors of your future descendants.
If we continue to trace back the digital river we could find the common ancestor linking most of the biosphere as a whole. He then introduces the molecular-clock theory. This is the rate at which a piece of text (in the DNA of cells) occurs over time. Some cells are critical to an organism’s survival like cytochrome c, so the change may be nominal over hundreds of thousands of years. Yea, we can trace back our common roots to the mitochondria that evolved over time to produce various cell types and later us.
Dawkins finishes the chapter with a rather confusing inference about the “most common [human] ancestor” which is a “Mitochondrial Eve” and a “Focal Ancestor [likely male]”. He proposes that the Mitochondrial Eve is relevant because the human sperm is to small but to carry a few mitochondrial cells, located in the tail. Once the sperm finds the egg the tail is severed. He states that theology clouds the understanding of our most remote common ancestor, the Mitochondrial Eve. He extrapolates that there were probably many women on earth at her time, just that she was probably the sole producer of a lineage of successful descendants, us — the living humans on earth today. He furthers his argument by stating that the distinction between the most recent common ancestor and the most recent common ancestor in the female line is rather important.
Do Good By Stealth
This chapter is a refute towards a converted atheist who became convinced of intelligent design, a creator — God. His observations of the orchid “tricking” the wasp into being the vehicle for pollination by posing as the sexual partner of the wasp. Here is the minister’s argument, “in order for that reproductive strategy to have worked at all, it had to be perfect the first time. No incremental steps could account for it.”
Dawkins immediately begins his retorts with the rhetorical statements like “Think back to the last time you were fooled by some chance resemblance. Perhaps you raised your hat to a stranger in the street, mistaking her for an acquaintance,” or “Film stars have stand-in stuntmen or stuntwomen to fall off horses or jump off cliffs in their stead. The stuntman’s resemblance to the star is usually extremely superficial, but in the fleeting action shot it is enough to fool an audience.” if we consider these to be moments of deception to be possible, then it is certain to believe that fooling a wasp may be a much easier task. There is even a phrase used for this outcome, the super-normal stimuli as coined by Tinbergen [2]. Tinbergen created many experiments that artificially “trick” various species with ranging intelligence levels, further setting up Dawkins explanation for the wasp being tricked by the orchid.
How many human inventions, such as the automobile or the airplane or the computer, were perfect on the first try? Taking this truth into consideration, Dawkins continues his argument for evolution in the form of adaption or development for species traits and behaviors rather than being perfect form the time of creation.
A great example of behaviors developing over time rather than being implemented initially upon creation comes from the honey bee. The intensity of the bees dance determines the distance at which the pollen could be found. Similar movements for other utilities can be explained by simple factors. The intensity is correlated with the distance of the dance because a location further from the hive would leave a bee more fatigued in contrast to a location closer to the hive.
Similarly, the phenomenon called convergence can explain the adaptive qualities that contribute to the development of various species, even in the most uninhabitable environments. The reason why animals can survive in the Mariana trench (1000+ atm) is the same reason why animals can live at a bone-crushing pressure of 999 atm. They both adapted (and thus grew slightly stronger) than the predecessor before it and those at sea level through environmental adaptation that gradually took place over hundreds of thousands of years.
Lastly, he talks about traits such as the development of a camera eye form nothing. The common argument debating evolution could be summed up by the question: “what does life need use for a half eye?”. Dawkins explanation of the gradual development of the eye can be found to have occurred 40–60 times, independently. Out of the forty-plus distinct times that the eye evolved 9 unique design attributes have been discovered (invertebrates). Half eyes overtime still demonstrate utility. The human eye, even with poor vision, has a great purpose for object detection and recognition. Some less sophisticated eyes may only be able to detect light from dark, day from night for creating and regulating circadian rhythm and mating cycles. The evolutions of the eye are less elusive now that we understand that from the magnificent to the terrible eyes regardless of their stage has utility. Lastly,
Here is what Reverend John Polkinghorne said to strengthen Dawkins theory.
“Someone like Richard Dawkins can present persuasive pictures of how the sifting and accumulation of small differences can produce large-scale developments, but, instinctively, a physical scientist would like to see an estimate, however rough, of how many steps would take us from a slightly light-sensitive cell to a fully formed insect eye, and of approximately the number of generations required for the necessary mutations to occur.”
God’s Utility Function
Darwin, in juxtaposition to the minister, lost faith because of the wasp. He questioned the Creators intentions if the deity existed. The design of some animals in cohabitation with the design of other animals is cruel. He asked if the creator had a sick sense of humor or a macabre lust for violence. He uses the cheetah and the gazelle as an analogy for his assertion. The cheetah seems to be designed to chase down gazelles effectively, while the gazelle, on the other hand, appeared to be designed to outrun the cheetah. He then posits that the creator with an implicit design must have the ability to reverse engineer a species to determine its purpose. He uses the slide rule as an example:
“The slide rule, talisman until recently of the honorable profession of engineer, is in the electronic age as obsolete as any Bronze Age relic. An archaeologist of the future, finding a slide rule and wondering about it, might note that it is handy for drawing straight lines or for buttering bread. But to assume that either of these was its original purpose violates the economy assumption. A mere straight-edge or butter knife would not have needed a sliding member in the middle of the rule. Moreover, if you examine the spacing of the graticules you find precise logarithmic scales, too meticulously disposed to be accidental. It would dawn on the archaeologist that, in an age before electronic calculators, this pattern would constitute an ingenious trick for rapid multiplication and division. The mystery of the slide rule would be solved by reverse engineering, employing”
With countless examples of natures proclivity towards disaster and violence, he declares that nature is neither cruel nor benevolent — it simply is.
God utility function is to survive and to procreate (to pass on genes). The cheetas purpose is to survive and procreate. Killing the gazelle is merely a means to an end. He states that “DNA survival, this is not a recipe for happiness. So long as DNA is passed on, it does not matter who or what gets hurt in the process”. This statement mirrors the bleak beginning of the chapter. He suggests that if nature was kind (or God benevolent) the natural administration of anesthetics would be delivered before painful incidents occurred.
For Nature, heartless, witless Nature Will neither care nor know. — A. E. Housman
The Replication Bomb
The opening of the chapter begins with the explanation of the stars life and death and more specifically those that “go supernova”. He creates a crude analogy called “going information” and called the information bomb a “replication bomb” After digressing a bit he continues to suggest that humans are the remnants of the replication bomb that occurred on Earth.
He continues to explain what success looks like to a biologist. The abundant nature of the descendant molecules (and later cells) shouldn’t constitute inherent success as water molecules are clustered together in abundance as well. Unlike cells, water molecules lack heredity — “like begets like”.
A large portion of the chapter is dedicated to explaining the right-handed and left-handed nature of molecules found in chemistry, specifically tartrate crystals that duplicate themselves by attracting similar atoms and forcing them into their unique positions — while acknowledging that chemists still don’t have all the answers as to why this occurs. This is set up for RNA and DNA. The evolution of mirror molecules engendered the creation of the two self-replicating molecules.
Lastly, growth for the sake of growth appears to be the raison d’être for all species on the planet — no one species makes a universal decision to regress, degenerate or give up altogether — and the world is currently in the midst of an explosion of genetic information that nears exponential growth. The digital river must continue to flow, and while humanity may not know its course, it seems clear that it will continue to work towards continuous replication.
Conclusion
DNA
DNA is the transmission of digital data that flows forward through time like a river. DNA is digital rather than analog because the transmission of DNA does not degrade over each iteration of replication. Furthermore, unlike the binary language, commonly associated with analog, DNA is a base 4-language. Since digital operates based on the encoding digital has the ability to create “words on a book” the same way DNA creates genomes.
Dawkins suggests that the primary cause of speciation occurs when geographical stimuli are introduced. Subsequently, when the digital river bifurcates completely, the two streams of data are no longer able to effectively communicate. Similarly, when the speciation process is completed after a millennium or more of gene evolution iterated over each generation the sub-set of animals are still fundamentally identical. However, because of the distinct difference of the data encoded the two may not have the ability to procreate again, or at the minimum produce sterile offspring — even if the animals possess similar physical features like the grey and red squirrel.
Common Ancestors & Co-ancestors
Dawkins asserts an inference about our “most common [human] ancestor” which is a “Mitochondrial Eve” and a “Focal Ancestor [likely male]”. He extrapolates that there were probably many women on earth at her time, just that she was probably the sole producer of a lineage of successful descendants, us — the living humans on earth today. He furthers his argument by stating that the distinction between the most recent common ancestor and the most recent common ancestor in the female line is rather important.
Correspondingly, with the same logic, we are likely to become co-ancestors with a majority of our anonymous neighbors and strangers. Here is an excerpt from the book:
Next time you are with a large group of people — say, in a concert hall or at a football match — look around at the audience and reflect upon the following: if you have any descendants at all in the distant future, there are probably people at the same concert whose hands you could shake as co-ancestors of your future descendants.
Evolution Takes Time
Evolution occurs on a macrocosmic time scale. The time span is nearly incomprehensible to us and that is why it is easy to believe that animals were created close to perfection by a deity. There was no intelligent design rather coincidence and circumstances that lead to speciation, evolution, and the development of particular traits and behaviors. Traits such as the camera lens of an eye were created 40 plus times, independently from each other all stemming from light-sensitive cells through, over time, becoming the eyes we know of today. Yet, the transitory iterations are still prevalent and even a “half-eye” still possess utility.
“God’s” Utility Function
The purpose for life as proposed by Dawkins (form a biological perspective) is to simply survive and to procreate (to pass on genes). The cheetahs' purpose is to survive and procreate. Killing the gazelle is merely a means to an end. He states that “DNA survival, this is not a recipe for happiness. So long as DNA is passed on, it doesn’t matter who or what gets hurt in the process”. This statement mirrors the bleak beginning of the chapter. He suggests that if nature was kind (or God benevolent) the natural administration of anesthetics would be delivered before painful incidents occurred.
Ultimate Purpose
Lastly, growth for the sake of growth appears to be the raison d’être for all species on the planet — no one species makes a universal decision to regress, degenerate or give up altogether — and the world is currently in the midst of an explosion of genetic information that nears exponential growth. The digital river must continue to flow, and while humanity may not know its course, it seems clear that it will continue to work towards continuous replication.
