I have to say, I am afraid I found this chapter labourious to read in most places. IMO I felt he just wasn't getting to the point. I don't get why Dawkins felt the need to teach me all about Platoism, essentialism and rabbits. I still don't get the connection.
I remember as a Jew, the JWs were teaching me the Trinity, which I could never comprehend only to tell me it was a false teaching. So I was having a bit of de ja vu, and the desire to get to the point.
The hairpin theory was interesting. How we can trace back an animal to a point, hairpin, and then go forward to a different animal. This hairpin point is the cousin, and common anacestor. No idea why he had to state that in such a long winded boring way. But the final point was interesting to me.
Breeds of dogs was boring, I kept looking forward to see how long the chapter was. You know, what you used to do with WT articles, hoping it was a 16 paragraph article. It rarely was. I don't know much about dogs, and certain breeds are alien to me. The main points I got from this were that Dawkins is against breeding as opposed to natural selection, because he stated he doesn't find melon sized boobs attractive and he thinks if body builders were even bigger they would be grotesque.
I don't have an opinion on breeding, but I have met many men who like melon sized boobs.
He was talking about gene pools surounding these other topics. I found it interesting that mixing genes are likened to shuffling cards rather than mixing paints. But there wasn't much scientific substance that I could get my teeth into.
He was then going on about his computer game, and even stated that it gets more interesting when we consider "embryology". I thought yeah, maybe for him. Then he had some computer pictures of shells. Sorry guys it actually wasn't more interesting. Well not for me anyway.
Overall, Dawkins didn't say anything that made me feel uncomfortable or offended. He made some interesting points about evolution, but they were buried in an overwhelming amount of boring information. I found it a tedious read.
Apologies Kate xx