The Magic of Reality

Richard Dawkins, “The Magic of Reality”, Free Press, 2011, 265pp


Richard Dawkins is a world-famous evolutionary biologist. In this illustrated book with pictures, sketches, etc…he explains that magic is what our ancestors used to explain the world before later ancestors developed the scientific method. For instance, the Vikings believed a rainbow was the gods’ bridge to earth. The Japanese used to explain earthquakes by conjuring a gigantic catfish that carried the world on its back—earthquakes occurred each time it flipped its tail. This book explains many myths as well as phenomena: Why do the continents look like disconnected pieces of a puzzle? What causes tsunamis? Why are there so many kinds of plants and animals? Who was the first man, or woman? This book is written much in the style of a High School textbook, which it could easily be—yet I found it quite informative and enjoyed reading it. This book should definitely be required reading for high school students and their parents.


My notes:
P. 50: Although we may lack the fossils to tell us exactly what our very ancient ancestors looked like, we are in no doubt at all that all living creatures are our cousins, and cousins of each other. And we also know which modern animals are close cousins of each other (like humans and chimpanzees, or rats and mice), and which are distant cousins of each other (like humans and cuckoos, or mice and alligators). We know this by systematically comparing their DNA’s. DNA is the genetic information that all living creatures carry in each of their cells. DNA is spelled out along massively coiled ‘tapes’ of data, call ‘chromosomes’. The DNA alphabet has only four letters to choose from (as opposed to the 26 letters of the English alphabet), which are written as A, T, C, and G.

P. 71: You’d only have to go back 6 million years to find the most recent shared ancestor of all humans and chimpanzees. That’s recent enough for us to guess at a possible geographical barrier that might have occasioned the original split. It’s been suggested that it was the Great Rift Valley in Africa, with humans evolving on the east side and chimpanzees on the west. It is suggested that the shared ancestor of all surviving mammals lived about 185 million years ago. (The big bang creating the universe and time and space is estimated to be between 13 and 14 billion years ago).

A group of animals is defined as a species if they can breed with each other. If populations of the same species are geographically separated, their gene pools have the opportunity to drift apart—so far apart, eventually, that if they happen to meet again they can no longer breed together. Evolution means change in a gene pool. Change in a gene pool means that some genes become more numerous, others less. Genes that used to be common become rare, or disappear altogether. Genes that used to be rare become common. And the result is that the shape, or size, or color, or behavior of typical members of the species changes: it evolves, because of changes in the numbers of genes in the gene pool. That is what evolution is. It is quite similar to how languages change over time.

P. 74: In the case of species, there is much more going on in gene pools than drifting apart; there is natural selection. This was Charles Darwin’s greatest discovery. Gene pool drifting is random without direction; natural selection, on the other hand, nudges evolution in a purposeful direction: namely, the direction of survival.

P. 107: The difference between mass and weight. All objects in an orbiting space station are weightless, but they are not massless. Their mass depends on the number of protons and neutrons they contain. Weight is the pull of gravity on your mass. On earth we can use weight to measure mass because the pull is (more or less) the same everywhere. But because more massive planets have stronger gravity, your weight changes depending which planet you are on, whereas your mass stays the same wherever you are—even if you are completely weightless in a space station in orbit. You’d be weightless on the space station because you and the weighing machine would both be ‘falling’ at the same rate; so your feet would exert no pressure on the weighing machine, which would, therefore, register you as weightless. But although you’d be weightless, you’d be far from massless. If you jumped vigorously away from the ‘floor’ of the space station, you’d shoot towards the ‘ceiling’ and, no matter how far away the ceiling was, you’d bang your head and it would hurt, just as if you had fallen on your head. If you tried to throw a cannonball, even though it would float about weightlessly, if you tried to throw it across the cabin, you’d soon know that it wasn’t light. It would be hard work to throw it, and you would find yourself shooting backward in the opposite direction if you tried. The cannonball would feel heavy, even though it would show no special tendency to go ‘downwards’ towards the floor. In a space station, a cannonball has much more mass than a balloon, although both have the same weight—zero.

P. 121: By the end of the Aztecs’ heyday, when the Spaniards arrived (bringing their own brand of gruesomeness), the sun cult had escalated to a gory climax. It is estimated that between 20,000 and 80,000 humans were sacrificed for the rededication of the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan in 1487. One of the main purposes of warfare was to collect lots of prisoners of war so that they could be sacrificed, usually by having their hearts cut out.

P. 187: Sleep paralysis: Normally when you are asleep and dreaming, your body is paralyzed. It is probably to stop your muscles from working in tune with your dreams and making you sleepwalk (though this does, of course, sometimes happen). And normally, when you wake and your dream vanishes, the paralysis goes and you can move your muscles. Occasionally some people experience a delay between your mind returning to consciousness and their muscles coming back to life, and that is called sleep paralysis. It is frightening, as you can imagine. You are sort of awake, and you can see your bedroom and everything in it, but you cannot move. Sleep paralysis is often accompanied by terrifying hallucinations. (The author attributes this phenomenon as the cause behind the many reports people make about being kidnapped by aliens).

P. 190: As of 2011 a grand total of 519 planets orbiting stars in our galaxy other than our sun have been discovered. In our galaxy, the great majority of stars where we have looked for planets have turned out to possess them. So, assuming our galaxy is typical, we can probably conclude that most of the stars in the universe have planets in orbit around them. The number of stars in our galaxy is about 100 billion, and the number of galaxies in the universe is about the same again.

P. 215: 150 million years ago many, now separate continents, were connected. For instance, Africa and South America were completely joined, as well as India and Antarctica, Australia, and New Zealand making up the supercontinent we now call Gondwana; the other supercontinent being Laurasia.
P. 230: myth of chakras.

P. 242: Examples of:
• bacterial diseases are tuberculosis, some kinds of pneumonia, whooping cough, cholera, diphtheria, leprosy, scarlet fever, boils, and typhus.
• viral diseases include measles, chickenpox, mumps, smallpox, herpes, rabies, polio, rubella, various varieties of influenza and the cluster of diseases that we call the common cold.
• malaria, amoebic dysentery, and sleeping sickness are among those diseases caused by protozoa.

P. 254: Humes’ response to miracles. If someone tells you a miracle story you should believe it only if it would be even more of a miracle for it to be a lie (or a mistake, or an illusion).