The Flights of Fancy: Defying Gravity by Design and Evolution

Richard Dawkins is an outstanding thinker of our time and the author of educational bestsellers such as “The Selfish Gene,” “A Fable in the Dark,” and “The Blind Watchmaker. How Evolution Proves There Is No Design in the Universe!”

Flight, the aerial element—dreams and goals that have hypnotized people for thousands of years. Earth’s gravity is a harsh reality that opposes that dream and nature must inevitably take into account. Evolution approached flight rationally: if, for the purposes of preserving the species, it’s necessary to fly, the means to do so will surely appear—even if it takes millions of years. Humans, in turn, have invented many ways to rise into the air and travel long distances: from the wings of the mythological Icarus to an airplane, and a long road has been traveled thanks to the fact that in every age there are people capable of “lifting themselves” in imagination—even while remaining on the ground. It is they who accumulate knowledge, discover the new, and lead others: “Perhaps the same drive for adventure that possessed the Polynesians as they discovered new islands still lives in the ‘call of space,’ prompting our kind to colonize Mars—and maybe, in the distant future, to reach the stars?”