I'm a big, big fan of Richard Dawkins. No one is more clear-thinking, in my estimation. At Jason Rosenhouse's blog today is a post about a talk Dawkins just gave at the University of Maryland. Here's an excerpt:
The conversation next addressed the gradualness of evolutionary change. If you imagine lining up all of your ancestors from the present to the dawn of time, you would not find two consecutive ancestors that were of different species. But because of the spans of time involved, the small, negligible variations from one generation to the next get magnified into large changes indeed. He likened this to a child growing up. There is no clear dividing point between babyhood and toddlerhood, just as there is no definitive moment when you suddenly go from being a child to being an adult (in all but the legal sense of course), but with the benefit of hindsight you can see that great changes have taken place.No one tells it like Dawkins. Reading "The Selfish Gene" changed my life by making me understand evolution. His writing is so precise, so clear that it rings. I would love to meet him one day.
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