Quotes from book
Climbing Mount Improbable

Name: Climbing Mount Improbable
Author: Richard Dawkins

Climbing Mount Improbable is a 1996 popular science book by Richard Dawkins. The book is about probability and how it applies to the theory of evolution. It is designed to debunk claims by creationists about the probability of naturalistic mechanisms like natural selection.The main metaphorical treatment is of a geographical landscape upon which evolution can ascend only gradually and cannot climb cliffs . In the book, Dawkins gives ideas about a seemingly complex mechanism coming about from many gradual steps that were previously unseen.

“It is grindingly, creakingly, crashingly obvious that, if Darwinism were really a theory of chance, it couldn't work.”

Richard Dawkins book Climbing Mount Improbable

Source: Climbing Mount Improbable (2006), p.77

“The attitude that living things are placed here for our benefit still dominates our culture, even where its underpinnings have disappeared. We now need, for purposes of scientific understanding, to find a less human-centered view of the natural world.”

Richard Dawkins book Climbing Mount Improbable

Source: Climbing Mount Improbable (1996), Chapter 8, “Pollen Grains and Magic Bullets” (p. 258)

“The plaint that there hasn’t been enough time for the eye to evolve turns out to be not just wrong but dramatically, decisively, ignominiously wrong.”

Richard Dawkins book Climbing Mount Improbable

Source: Climbing Mount Improbable (1996), Chapter 5, “The Forty-fold Path to Enlightenment” (p. 166)

“It is easy to think of DNA as the information by which a body makes another body like itself. It would be more correct to see a body as the vehicle used by DNA to make more DNA like itself.”

Richard Dawkins book Climbing Mount Improbable

Source: Climbing Mount Improbable (1996), Chapter 3, “The Message from the Mountain” (pp. 89-90)