I developed this powerpoint when I taught River Out of Eden by Richard Dawkins. Most of the students found Dawkins to be fascinating, but they weren't so hot on the actual book.

1. River Out of Eden
A Look at Richard Dawkins and the
Gene Theory of Evolution
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2. Dawkins Quoted
• For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most
creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of cells is a
colony of bacteria.
• If you want to do evil, science provides the most powerful weapons to do
evil; but equally, if you want to do good, science puts into your hands the
most powerful tools to do so.
• The world and the universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more
we understand about it the more beautiful does it appear.
• There are all sorts of things that would be comforting. I expect an
injection of morphine would be comforting... But to say that something is
comforting is not to say that it's true.
• There's this thing called being so open-minded your brains drop out.
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3. It Gets Better!
• It is an article of passionate faith among "politically correct" biologists
and anthropologists that brain size has no connection with intelligence;
that intelligence has nothing to do with genes; and that genes are
probably nasty fascist things anyway.
• The likelihood is that, in 100,000 years time, we shall either have
reverted to wild barbarism, or else civilization will have advanced beyond
all recognition--into colonies in outer space...
• There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence
for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be
agnostic with respect to fairies?
• What are all of us but self-reproducing robots? We have been put
together by our genes and what we do is roam the world looking for a
way to sustain ourselves and ultimately produce another robot child.
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4. Some Background on Dawkins
Dawkins was an Assistant Professor of Zoology at the University of
California, Berkeley from 1967 to 1969. In 1970 he was appointed a Lecturer, and
ten years later he was appointed a Reader in Zoology at Oxford University. (For
readers from the USA a "Reader" in a British university is approximately equivalent
to an "Associate Professor" or "Full Professor" in the US.)
• In 1995, he was appointed Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of
Science at the University of Oxford. This position was endowed by Charles Simonyi
with an express intention that Dawkins be its first holder. He has been a fellow of
New College, Oxford since 1970. (A fellow is part of the governing body of the
university.)
• Education, positions and degrees
• 1954-1959 Oundle School
• 1959-1962 Balliol College, Oxford University
• 1962-1966 Research Student, Oxford University (D.Phil., 1966)
• 1965-1967 Research Assistant to Professor N.Tinbergen FRS
• 1967-1969 Assistant Professor of Zoology, University of California, Berkeley
• 1969-1970 Senior Research Officer, Department of Zoology, Oxford
• 1970-1990 University Lecturer (US: Adjunct Professor) in Zoology, and Fellow of New College, Oxford
• 1989 D.Sc. (Oxford)
• 1990-1995 Reader in Zoology (US: "Associate Professor" or "Full Professor"), Oxford University
• 1995-2008 Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, University of Oxford, and
Professorial Fellow of New College
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5. His Books
• Richard Dawkins has published a vast range of material.
• The Selfish Gene (1976)
• The Extended Phenotype (1982)
• The Blind Watchmaker (1986)
• River Out of Eden (1995)
• Climbing Mount Improbable (1996)
• Unweaving the Rainbow (1997)
• A Devil’s Chaplain (2003)
• The Ancestor’s Tale (2004)
• The God Delusion (2006) He is best known for this book.
• The Greatest Show on Earth (2009)
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6. Important Terms
• Genes: working subunits of DNA. Each gene contains a particular set of instructions, usually coding
for a particular protein.
• Ancestor: a person from whom one is descended. In biology it is the actual or hypothetical form or
stock from which an organism has developed or descended.
• Utility Function: an economic term—Dawkins defines it as “that which is maximized.”(103) He
writes: Utilitarians strive to maximize the greatest number”(104) Dawkins sees natural selection as
using genetic codes as a method to strengthen individual species—it has a utility or useful function.
• Reverse Engineering: Dawkins takes this term from Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett. It
is a reasoning technique. He writes: “You are an engineer, confronted with an artifact you…don’t
understand. You make the assumption that it was designed for some purpose….You analyze the
object with a view to working out what problem it would be good at solving.” (103)
• Genetic Drift: the random change in the genetic composition of a population due to chance events
causing unequal participation of individuals in producing succeeding generations. Along with
natural selection, genetic drift is a principal force in evolution.
• Meme: the basic building blocks of our minds and culture, in the same way that genes are the
basic building blocks of biological life.
• The idea of memetics is in extending Darwinian evolution to culture. There are several conclusions
from doing that, one of which is the ability to predict that ideas will spread not because they are
"good ideas", but because they contain "good memes" such as danger, food and sex that push our
evolutionary buttons and force us to pay attention to them. Dawkins applies the term in his
preceding book, The Selfish Gene.
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7. More Terms in River Out of Eden
• Self-replicate: the ability to use surrounding materials to make exact copies of itself.
• River of DNA: a metaphor to indicate the gradual flow of geological time in which life
forms share their genetic codes as an improvement for each species.
• DNA: deoxyribonucleic acid, is the hereditary material in humans and almost all other
organisms. Nearly every cell in a person’s body has the same DNA. Most DNA is located
in the cell nucleus (where it is called nuclear DNA), but a small amount of DNA can also
be found in the mitochondria .
• Mitochondria: membrane-bound cell organelles (mitochondrion, singular) that
generate most of the chemical energy needed to power the cell's biochemical
reactions. Chemical energy produced by the mitochondria is stored in a small molecule
called adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Mitochondria contain their own small
chromosomes. Generally, mitochondria, and therefore mitochondrial DNA, are
inherited only from the mother.
• Mitochondrial DNA contains 37 genes, all of which are essential for normal
mitochondrial function. Thirteen of these genes provide instructions for making
enzymes involved in oxidative phosphorylation. The remaining genes provide
instructions for making molecules called transfer RNAs and ribosomal RNAs , which are
chemical cousins of DNA. These types of RNA help assemble protein building blocks
(amino acids) into functioning proteins.
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8. Genetic Drift
Mitochondrial Dna
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9. Bertolino--Mosaic 852-River Out of Eden 9

10. Utility Function
Reverse Engineering
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11. Chapter 1: The Digital River
• How do we understand the term digital?
• 1. Binary storage of information as 1s and 0s
• 2. Having to do with digits (fingers or toes),performed with a finger-
Property of representing values as discrete numbers rather than a
continuous spectrum.
• 3. Displaying numbers rather than scale positions; "digital clock”--
A circuit or device that represents magnitudes in digits; "digital
computer“.
• The river of DNA is a river of coded genetic information that flows
downward—it is linear like time. The river gathers more DNA to
create more genetic information.
• The metaphor is designed to explain ancestry and descents. We
descend down the river, but we begin with a source—the origin of
the river . That would be our original ancestor.
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12. The DNA River and Eve
Consider an extremely prolific woman living today. She has many daughters and takes a vacation to a
remote Caribbean island for a week. During the same week a plague of a mutated Ebola virus sweeps
the Earth and drastically decreases the fecundity of all living women. Not only that, the viral infection
also changes the genome of these women so that the daughters they give birth to will inherit this
reduced fecundity. This means that far more than average of their fetuses will undergo abortions (or, in
a somewhat kinder scenario, their female fetuses will be aborted more often than male ones).
• Only this one woman and her daughters who were off in this Caribbean island are safe from the viral
plague. Also assume that the viral plague consumes itself within that fateful week. This woman and her
daughters are now free to breed in a world where their reproductive potential far outstrips that of every
other woman alive (and to be born of these women). Soon, almost every one on Earth will be related in
some fashion to this one woman. Finally, when the last woman who was born to one of the matrilineal
descendents of an infected woman dies, the non-infected Caribbean tourist takes on the title of the new
Mitochondrial Eve. Every human alive on Earth at that point in time is now related via the mitochondrial
line to her.
• But consider this new twist. Suppose a group of astronauts (men and women) were sent off into space
during the infection week, and were thus not infected themselves. After many centuries in a Moon or
Mars colony, they returned to Earth. At that time, suddenly, the title of Mitochondrial Eve would revert
back to our own ME. The humans alive on the Earth at that time would all share their mitochondrial
DNA with an earlier common ancestor.
• As an exercise, try to eliminate just one phrase of the definition of the ME and see what happens. The
key terms are most-recent, common ancestor, humans alive today, matrilineal descent.
• (see previous slide for source) Bertolino--Mosaic 852-River Out of Eden 12

13. Chapter 2:All Africa and Her Progeny--
Mitochondrial Eve
Mitochondrial Eve refers to the most recent common
matrilineal ancestor from whom all living humans are
descended. Passed down from mother to offspring, all
mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) in every living person is
directly descended from hers. Mitochondrial Eve is the
female counterpart of Y-chromosomal Adam, the
patrilineal most recent common ancestor, although
they lived thousands of years apart.
• Mitochondrial Eve is generally estimated to have lived
around 200,000 years ago, most likely in Africa, when
Homo sapiens (us) were developing as a species
separate from other human species.
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14. Another interpretation of Eve—
Lucy as the original ancestor.
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15. More On M. Eve
• The ME represents that woman whose mitochondrial DNA (with mutations) exists in all the
humans now living on Earth. That does not mean that she is our lone woman ancestor. We
have ancestors who are not via matrilineal descent. For example, our father's mother (who
did pass on her mitochondrial DNA to her daughters) is an example of an ancestor who is not
matrilineal to us. However, she did exist at one time and was probably of the same age as our
mother's mother, who is a matrilineal ancestor of ours and from whom we got our
mitochondrial DNA.
• The term Mitochondrial Eve itself is a title given retroactively to a woman. Often (and as is
certainly the case with the ME that we are discussing) the conferring of the title occurs many
hundreds of thousands of years after the death of the woman in question.
• ME lived with many other humans (men and women); she was certainly not alone. When she
was alive, she was most certainly NOT the Mitochondrial Eve. The title at that time was held
by a distant ancestor of hers (and of the many humans who were her contemporaries).
• The existence of the Mitochondrial Eve is NOT a theory; it is a mathematical fact (unless
something like a multiple-origins theory of human evolution i.e. the human species arose
independently in different geographically separated populations, and that the present-day
ease of interbreeding is the result of a remarkable convergent evolution, is true.
• (same source—see previous slide)
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16. What Does This Mean?
• The name Eve, in retrospect, is perhaps the worst possible name to give to
the entity in question. I believe that this is probably the cause of so much
confusion in understanding what the significance of this entity is. People
think that this title has some deep theological or religious consequences.
Nothing of that sort.
• Someone you come across who claims that the bible (or the book of
Genesis) has been validated by the discovery of the Mitochondrial Eve, is
talking crap---you should feel free, and even obligated, to tell them so. The
Mitochondrial Eve of 200,000 years ago (ME for short henceforth) is NOT
our common ancestor, or even common genetic ancestor. She is the most-
recent common ancestor of all humans alive on Earth today with respect
to matrilineal descent. That may seem like a mouthful, but without even a
single one of those qualifying phrases, any description or discussion of the
ME reduces to a lot of nonsense.
• (taken from “What, if anything, is a Mitochondrial Eve?” by
Krishna Kunchithapadam
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17. One Explanation (Discussed in Class)
Consider all the humans alive today on Earth. Put them into a set S.
Next, consider the set of all those women who were the mothers of the people in the set S. Call this set
S'. A few observations about this new set S'. It consists of only women (while set S consists of both men
and women)---this is because we chose to follow only the mother-of relationship in going from set S to set
S'. Also note that not every member of set S' needs to be in set S---set S consists of all people living
today, while some of the mothers of living people could have died, they would be in set S' but not in set S.
Third, the size of set S' is never larger than the size of set S. Why? This is because of the simple fact that
each of us has only one mother. It is however overwhelmingly more likely that the size of set S' is much
smaller than that of set S---this is because each woman usually has more than one child.
• Repeat the process of following the mother-of relationship with set S' to generate a new set S''. This set will
consist of only women, and will be no larger (and very likely smaller) than set S'.
Continue this process. There will come a point when the set will consist of smaller and smaller number of
women, until we finally come to a single woman who is related to all members in our original set via the
transitive-closure of the mother-of relation. There is nothing special about her.
• So there must exist a single woman whose is the matrilineal most-recent common ancestor of every in set
S. A few others points to keep in mind. One might say that if each woman has only a single daughter (and
however many sons), the size of the sets will be the same as we extrapolate backwards. But also note that
this backwards mathematical extrapolation is an extrapolation into the past. This process cannot be
continued indefinitely because the age of the Earth, life on Earth, and the human species is finite (this
argument comes from Dawkins).
• ( taken from Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea)
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18. Chapter 3: Do Good by Stealth
• The chapter’s name comes from a quote by Alexander Pope, the
18th century English poet:
• Do good by stealth, and blush to find it fame.
• It is another way of suggesting that the left hand should not know
what the right hand is doing.
• For Dawkins, it points to gradualism in evolution. As he writes:
• Do good by stealth. A key feature of evolution is its gradualness.
This is a matter of principle rather than fact….Evolution is very
possibly not…always gradual. But it must be gradual when it is
…used to explain the coming of existence of complicated ,
apparently designed objects, like eyes. For if it is not gradual…it
ceases to have any explanatory power at all. Without
gradualism…we are back to miracle which is simply a synonym for
the total absence of explanation. (83)
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19. Chapter 4: God’s Utility Function
See reverse engineering and utility function on
the earlier slides.
Dawkins discusses the overall design of nature which is no design at all. He
writes: “We cannot admit that things may be neither good nor
evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous—indifferent to all
suffering, lacking all purpose.” (96)This chapter serves as a prelude to his
disdain for any God belief system.
• He writes: “So long as DNA is passed on, it does not matter who or what
gets hurt in the process.” (131)
• He discusses the argument of senescence-the science of aging:
• The evolutionary theory of aging proposes two models for how aging can
evolve. One derives from ideas in which genetic drift and mutation
accumulation lead to the loss of late-acting beneficial genes or to the
appearance of late-acting harmful genes. In another model, aging evolves
due to the multiple effect of genes that are beneficial early in life and then
harmful at late ages. At present, both theories are widely accepted and
they are not mutually exclusive, yet Dawkins seems more convinced by the
latter.* (source:” The Evolutionary Theory of 852-River Out of Eden de Magalhães, Ph.D)
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Aging” by João Pedro
19

20. Chapter 5: The Replication Bomb
• Supernova: a star suddenly flares without warning—increases in
brightness by a factor of many billions, then dies away to a former
remnant of itself. (135)
• Replication bombs: stars that “go information”-the triggering event
of a replication bomb is the spontaneous arising of self-replicating
yet variable entities. It comes from exponential growth of an object
that copies itself. Example: “Once you have a self-replicating object,
you will soon have two.” (137)
• See page 138: “We have no direct evidence of the replication event
that initiated the proceedings on this planet. We can only infer that
it must have happened…it began as a chemical event.”
• See page 145:“Our replication bomb has taken a few billion years
to reach the radio threshold—the moment when a proportion of
the information overflows from the parent world and …bathes the
world with pulses of meaning.”
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21. Appearance of a Supernova
Supernova Explosion Supernova Explosion
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22. Big Bang Theory
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23. Replication Bomb—Disease as
Example—HIV and Hepatitis C
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24. Source of the book title
Genesis 2:8-10 Rivers in Genesis
• Now the LORD God had planted a
garden in the east, in Eden; and
there he put the man he had
formed.
• 9 And the LORD God made all
kinds of trees grow out of the
ground—trees that were pleasing
to the eye and good for food. In
the middle of the garden were
the tree of life and the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil.
• 10 A river watering the garden
flowed from Eden; from there it
was separated into four
headwaters.
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