If we ran the tape backward, how would our echo system look like? I think that natural selection is so, so powerful. On the other hand, of course, the er the physics is not lesse going to be the same. If they're not living in perpetual mud or something like that, so that you can actuallyer light rays are available, then you will get eyes and probably compound eyes and camera eyes. Um, will you get wheels? Well, er the wheel, perhaps depends upon the prior invention of the road, orfor before. Well, is wheels ot much go d on a ploughed field? It's just two oas. Em, hae you
Evolution has equipped species with a variety of ways to travel through the air — flapping, gliding, floating, not to mention jumping really high. But it hasn’t invented jet engines. What are the different ways that heavier-than-air objects might be made to fly, and why does natural selection produce some of them but not others? Richard Dawkins has a new book on the subject, Flights of Fancy: Defying Gravity by Design and Evolution. We take the opportunity to talk about other central issues in evolution: levels of selection, the extended phenotype, the role of adaptation, and how genes relate to organisms.
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Richard Dawkins received his Ph.D. in zoology from the University of Oxford. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, where he was previously the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science. He is an internationally best-selling author, whose books include The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, and The God Delusion. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Literature.
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