Review of Richard Dawkins’s book, River Out of Eden.
This paper provides a review of the book, River Out of Eden, by Richard Dawkins. The review provides summaries of the main arguments from each chapter and a discussion, in particular, of the different thresholds mentioned by Dawkins.
In the first chapter, The Digital River, Dawkins introduces the idea of evolution by comparing it to a river, metaphorical, and changing over time. The river, he tells us, contains all of the DNA that has survived up until that point, and through the course of time, the river has deviated from its original path, producing different routes for the river, different branches, as he calls them. On each of these different branches of the river, he says, different combinations of DNA have been put together, and different genes have been constructed, giving different forms of life on each of the different pathways.