10 Two kinds of architecture. La Sagrada Família church (right) was designed to the last detail, by a great architect. The termite castle (left), photographed by Fiona Stewart in Australia, was not designed. Not by termites, not by their DNA, not by God. (See Chapter 10.)
Hard to believe the starlings (11) are not directed by a master choreographer, so perfectly coordinated are they. The flock looks like a single organism, a giant aerial amoeba. But there’s no choreographer.
A computer simulation (12) shows how it’s done. (See Chapter 10.)
13 A trick picture. The top half is a real photograph of real galaxies. The bottom half is a computer simulation, the Illustris simulation of the development of the universe beginning almost immediately (a mere 300,000 years) after the Big Bang. Can you tell the difference? (See Chapter 12.)
Picture acknowledgements
This page: Anders Ryman/Getty. this page: Denis-Huot/naturepl.com. this page: Svoboda Pavel/Shutterstock. this page and this page: Roger T. Hanlon. this page: Ron Offermans/Buiten-beeld/Minden/Getty. this page: all Alex Hyde. this page: top left Martin Fowler/Shutterstock; top right Monontour/Shutterstock; middle left Lisa Mar/Shutterstock; middle right Kawongwarin/Shutterstock; bottom left Simon Bratt/Shutterstock; bottom right Aprilflower7/Shutterstock. this page: top left Fiona Stewart; top right unknown. this page David Tipling/naturepl.com. this page: Jill Fantauzza. this page: Illustris Simulation/illustris-project.org.
This page: Photo and specimen from Carles Millan.
By Richard Dawkins
Outgrowing God
Brief Candle in the Dark
An Appetite for Wonder
The Magic of Reality (with Dave McKean)
The Greatest Show on Earth
The God Delusion
The Ancestor’s Tale
A Devil’s Chaplain
Unweaving the Rainbow
River Out of Eden
The Blind Watchmaker
The Extended Phenotype
The Selfish Gene
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
RICHARD DAWKINS is one of our greatest explainers, thinkers and writers and has been acknowledged as such since publication of his world-altering first book, The Selfish Gene (1976), which was voted the Royal Society’s ‘Most Inspiring Science Book of All Time’. He is also the author of the bestsellers The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable, The Ancestor’s Tale, The God Delusion and The Magic of Reality, two anthologies, A Devil’s Chaplain and Science in the Soul, and two volumes of autobiography, An Appetite for Wonder and Brief Candle in the Dark. He is a Fellow of New College, Oxford, and of both the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Literature. In 2013 Dawkins was voted the world’s top thinker in Prospect magazine’s poll of 10,000 readers from over 100 countries.
richarddawkins.net
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