p 6 (4*)
I think that the distinction between accident and design is clear, in principle if not always in practice, but this chapter will introduce a third category of objects which is harder to distinguish. I shall call them designoid [...]. Designoid objects are living bodies and their products. Designoid objects look designed, so much that some people —probably, alas, most people— think that they are designed. These people are wrong. But they are right in their conviction that designoid objects cannot be the result of chance. Designoid objects are not accidental. They have in fact been shaped by a magnificent non-random process which creates an almost perfect illusion of design.
p 79 (70*)
The metaphor of Mount Improbable dramatizes the mistake of the sceptics quoted at the beginning of this chapter [among which Lord Kelvin and Herschel]. Where they went wrong was to keep their eyes fixed on the vertical precipice and its dramatic height. They assumed that the sheer cliff was the only way up to the summit on which are perched eyes and protein molecules and other supremely improbable arrangements of parts. It was Darwin's great achievement to discover the gentle gradients winding up the other side of the mountain.
p 90 (80*)
The Darwinian explanation for why living things are so good at doing what they do is very simple. They are good because of the accumulated wisdom of their ancestors. But it is not wisdom that has been learned or acquired. It is wisdom that they chanced upon by lucky random mutations, wisdom that was then selectively, non-randomly, recorded in the genetic database of the species.
p 91 (81*)
Every generation has its Darwinian failures, but every individual is descended only from previous generations' successful minorities.The message from the mountain is threefold. First [...] there can be no sudden leaps upwards [...] Second, there can be no going downhill — species can't get worse as a prelude to getting better. Third, there may be more than one peak — more than one way of solving the same problem, all flourishing in the world.
p 103 (93*)
The number of vertebrae in different species of snakes varies from about 200 to 350.
p 127*
It has been authoritatively estimated that eyes have evolved no fewer than forty times, and probably more than sixty times, independently in various parts of the animal kingdom.
[...] Nine distinct principles have been recognized [...]
p 128*
[...] these are all eyes of modern animals, not of true ancestors.
[...] What we may think of as a way station up the slope towards a more advanced eye may be, for the animal itself, its most vital organ and very probably the ideal eye fo its own particular way of life.
p 166 (pp 153-154*)
At the end of the calculation, it turned out that it would take only about 364,000 generations to evolve a good fish eye with a lens. [...] So Nilsson and Pelger's conclusion is that the evolution of the lens eye could have been accomplished in less than half a million years.[...] It is so short that, in the strata of the ancient eras we are talking about, it would be indistinguishable from instantaneous.
p 164*
Lenses and curved mirrors are two ways of sharply focusing an image. In both cases the image is upside-down and left-right reversed. A completely different kind of eye, which produces an image the right way up, is the compound eye, favoured by insects, crustaceans, some worms and molluscs, king crabs (strange marine creatures said to be closer to spiders that to real crabs) and the large group of now extinct trilobites.
pp 166-167*
The consequence is that, in order to make a compound eye see as precisely as the human camera eye, the compound eye would have to be ludicrously large: twenty-four metres in diameter!
p 182 (p 168*)
Dan Nilsson [...] remarks of compound eyes that 'It is only a small exageration to say that evolution seems to be fighting a desperate battle to improve a basically disastrous design'.
p 176*
Halder, Callaerts and Gehring succeeded in introducing the mouse gene in Drosophila embryos. Mirabile dictu, the mouse gene induced ectopic eyes in Drosophila. [...] Notice by the way, that it is an insect compound eye that has been induced, not a mouse eye.
p 242 (221-222*)
Flies have lost one pair of wings and kept the other pair. [...] An engineer designing an aircraft would sit down at a drawing board and design a stabilizing instrument from scratch. Evolution achieves the same result by modifying what is already there, in this case a wing.
p 259 (238*)
The bees work hard for their nectar reward. To make one pound of clover honey, bees have to visit about ten million blossoms.
p 276 (254*)
Flowers and elephants are hosts to their own DNA in the same kind of way as they are hosts to virus DNA.p 291 (266*)[...] Imagine something like a computer virus which, instead of having a ready-made computer all set up to obey its instructions, had to start from scratch. [...] Let's call it the ‘Total Replication of Instructions Program’ or TRIP.
A blue whale is made of about a hundred thousand trillion (1017) cells. But, such is the power of exponential growth, it would only take about fifty-seven cell generations, under ideal conditions, to produce such a leviathan.
‘Selfish genes’ and short-term benefit are always favoured in a world where others are coping with the long-term needs of the race.p 325 (293*)
Figs and fig wasps occupy the high ground of evolutionary achievement: a spectacular pinnacle of Mount Improbable. Their relationship is almost ludicrously tortuous and subtle. It cries out for interpretation in the language of deliberate, conscious, Machiavellian calculation. Yet it is achieved in the complete absence of any kind of deliberation, without brain power or intelligence of any kind.