The Tyranny of the Discontinuous Mind

That's a phrase from Richard Dawkin's book The Ancestor's Tale which I'm listening to (in audio book form) at the moment. It appears in a chapter called 'The Salamander's Tale' which is quite simply the most illuminating few pages on the subject of evolution that I've ever read, not only for the discussion of ring species, but also for the moral drawn (the bit where the above phrase appears).

Simply put - my understanding here - species names are just a convenience, it would be more correct to view all of the living things on this planet as different 'flavours' of the same thing - modern humans would be a certain blend of smoothie, and cats would be another - but we're all smoothies (what a terrible metaphor ;-). The fact that we don't see the different blends that led to us and cats from our shared ancestor is because these blends no longer exist - but as Dawkins points out, this is the merest accident (or perhaps 'survival of the fittest' is a much more ruthless culler of the intermediates in those ring species that move through the time dimension because time, unlike space, cannot be shared with those neighbours who are 'better' than you in an evolutionary sense).

Read that chapter then and see if it makes as much sense to you as it did to me (there's a video of the first part of the chapter here). Like my last post, this is something that's hard to think about but which I, on a mental level (yes my 'gut feeling' is still lagging behind), believe is true - another dent to the me centered universe...