Musings on the Magic of Reality by Richard Dawkins

Today I finished reading the Magic of Reality by Richard Dawkins.

I bought from iTune stores for iPad because it comes with an app to play around (Only available for iPad, not for iPhone). In addition, the app offers illustrations for each chapter, theory, and findings so that a reader can better conceptualize while they're reading. The book was intended for 12 years old and adults from non scientific background. It's so much clearer and easily understandable. But Dawkins answered that it's so much harder for him to write such a book because he has to maintain scientific facts and integrity while reducing the complexity of the scientific terms.

I learned a few facts from the book. One of the claims that I found it interesting and quaint is if we go back 185 million years back and check how our ancestors look like, they would all look like ----- a fish.

The time was back in 2002, when I was a 2nd year medical student, doodling all the anatomical structures I could muster from my memorization, all nerve supply from the brains, I found it weird that a particular nerve going all the way down from the brain to the chest until it's about to reach to the level of heart, loops back up along the neck and comes back to reach the voice box (larynx).

It's therefore called Recurrent Laryngeal Nerve.

I didn't really pay much attention to why this particular nerve goes roundabout and recurs.

Now it all comes back to me as a flashback where I remember watching Richard Dawkins showing the same nerve in a giraffe also taking a long road (If you imagine how long a giraffe neck could be), and the pattern of recurrent nerve repeating in fish as well.

This piece of evidence is used to refute "Intelligent Design".

Whatever the path evolution takes and makes everything, we are so much luckier that we evolved into something that is capable of "Abstract Thinking".

I can't imagine what would have happened if the Dinosaurs were as intelligent in the past as we humans are nowadays.