The View From Mount Improbable: Pocket Penguins (Pocket Penguins 70's S.) - Tapa blanda

In May 2005 Penguin will publish 70 unique titles to celebrate the company's 70th birthday. The titles in the Pocket Penguins series are emblematic of the renowned breadth of quality of the Penguin list and will hark back to Penguin founder Allen Lane's vision of 'good books for all'. In this extract from Climbing Mount Improbable Richard Dawkins, bestselling author of The Blind Watchmaker, gives an introduction to evolutionary biology and unravels the mysteries of the highest peak of all: the eye.

Richard Dawkins's first book The Selfish Gene (1976) became an immediate international bestseller. Since then his Penguin bestsellers have included The Blind Watchmaker (1986) and Unweaving the Rainbow (1999). He has won an extraordinary number of awards, prizes and honorary degrees for his work popularising science. In 1970 Richard Dawkins became a Lecturer in Zoology at Oxford Universtiy and a Fellow of New College. In 1995 he became the first Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science.