Dawkins’s prose is compelling and imaginative, and the points he brings up about evolution and the origin of life are thought-provoking and bold. He doesn’t hesitate to criticise/poke fun at people, whether that be the religious right, President Bush, Tony Blair, intelligent design theorists—but you have to give him credit for his persuasiveness and clear arguments. He highlights the beauty of Darwinian evolution by making it seem simultaneously complex and simple; one of my favorite parts of the entire book is this excerpt from the end of a subchapter called “The Flounder’s Tale” :

Perfectionism is a vice of evolutionists. We are so used to the wonders of Darwinian adaptation, is it tempting to believe there could be nothing better… [but] imagine how imperfect a jet engine would be if, instead of being designed on a clean drawing board, it had to be changed one step at a time, screw by screw and rivet by rivet, from a propeller engine.

A skate is a flat fish that might have been designed on a drawing board to be flat, resting on its belly, with wide ‘wings’ reaching symmetrically out to both sides. Teleost flatfish do it a different way. They rest on one side, either the left (e.g. plaice) or the right (e.g. turbot and flounder). Whichever the side, the shape of the whole skull is distorted so that the eye on the lower side moves over to the upper side, where it can see. Picasso would have loved them. But, by the standards of any drawing board, they are revealingly imperfect. They have precisely the kind of imperfection you would expect from being evolved rather than designed.