The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True
Richard Dawkins
 Most chapters begin with quick retellings of historical creation myths that emerged as attempts to explain the origin of particular observed phenomena. These myths are chosen from all across the world including Babylonian, Judeochristian, Aztec, Maori, Ancient Egyptian, Aboriginal, Nordic, Hellenic, Chinese, Japanese, and other traditions. Chapter 9 includes contemporary alien abduction mythology and Chapter 4 omits mythology altogether as Dawkins says that really small phenomena were unknown to primitive peoples prior to the invention of advanced optical magnification equipment, any texts they believed to be divinely inspired having failed to mention such useful knowledge as beyond human experience at the time. Dawkins also revisits his childhood and recalls his initial thoughts on these various phenomena or those thoughts expressed by his young contemporaries. Dawkins gives his critique of many of the myths, such as when he points out that much myth involves some god's symbolic transgressive act performed just once, with Dawkins saying that such one-time acts would be inadequate to explain the mechanism as to why the phenomena continue to happen in unbroken cycles. In the opening chapter Dawkins explains that although mythic narratives and make-believe are fun parts of growing up, reality with its fundamental capacity for beauty is much more magical than anything impossible. The Fairy Godmother from Cinderella cannot magically turn a pumpkin into a carriage outside the bounds of fiction, the reason being that such objects as pumpkins and carriages in reality possess internal organization that is fundamentally complex. A large pumpkin randomly reassembled at the most minute level would be much more likely to result in a featureless pile of ash or sludge than a complex and intricately organized carriage. In the subsequent chapters Dawkins addresses topics that range from his most familiar territory, evolutionary biology and speciation, to physical phenomena such as atomic theory, optics, planetary motion, gravitation, stellar evolution, spectroscopy, and plate tectonics, as well as speculation on exobiology. Dawkins admits his understanding of quantum mechanics is foggy and so declines to delve very far into that topic. Dawkins declares that there was no first person, to make the point that in evolutionary biology the term species is used to demark differences in gene composition over often thousands of generations of separation rather than any one generation to the next. To illustrate this he uses the example of family photographs. If, hypothetically, there existed a complete set of photographs of all one's direct male ancestors arranged in order of birth date (or hatch date) from youngest to oldest stretching back millions of generations, from one generation to the next one would not perceive much difference between any two pictures—looking at a picture of one's grandfather or great-grandfather one is looking at a picture of a human—but if one looked at the picture 185 million generations back one would be looking at a picture of some kind of fish. Dawkins stresses this point by saying the offspring of any sexually reproducing life form is in almost all cases the same species as its parents, with the exception of unviable hybrids such as mules. The last two chapters cover a discussion on chaos and the human psychology behind so-called miracle claims such as the Our Lady of Fátima and Cottingley Fairies examples. Dawkins presents philosopher David Hume's argument that miracle claims should only be seriously accepted if it would be a bigger miracle that the claimant was either lying or mistaken. Dawkins continues, saying miracle claims written down in texts subsequently deemed sacred are not exempt from this standard.