Dawkins' Climbing Mount Improbable is deceptively simple. It is simple because the author provides commonsense explanations of the natural world in an almost systematic fashion. He uses the metaphor of a mountain that is very gradually and very slowly building up and becoming "itself" over thousands of years, yet throughout the process is changing all the time. That is an easy concept to grasp. Yet the book is deceptive because underneath the commonsense explanations are extremely complex ideas about how the natural world as the modern period knows it evolved over millions of years. Through those years multiple species and land forms constantly emerged, changed, and went extinct and are still doing so, in ways that seem to be only partly understood, given the present-day persistent controversy surrounding evolution and natural selection. As Dawkins notes early on (1996, p. 4), DNA develops in some 30 million ways.
The presentation of the text is a re-presentation of Darwin's theory of evolution. A key aspect of this is that the book carries an entirely secular point of view; Dawkins is not a man of faith and specifically and programmatically denies that there is a divine agency to what some call the Creation. There is no intelligent design, no unmoved mover, and no origin of the natural world outside the cosmos or in it, for that matter. Things that are designed are designoid. And those that are not intelligently designed, such as living things in nature, are not entirely random, but that does not mean that they are shaped by an intelligence external to them or indeed that their design is a result of their own intelligence. Instead, their design is a consequence or result of multiple adaptations--more exactly accretions of adaptations and mutations--of their species that occurred before their existence. In the sense that the adaptations were responses to environmental factors and that the effect not extinction but the trans...