I’ve just finished a several week virtual book club with a friend in Colorado. We both downloaded and listened while driving, to Richard Dawkins’ latest book on evolution, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. During the day one of us would call the other to appraise our progress, go over what struck us the most, or what was most difficult. In addition we kept up a shared document at Evernote, an Intenet based note-keeping site. We wrote up salient points from Dawkins’ arguments, posted links to supporting material and pasted in charts, photos and cartoons that seemed apropos.
Dawkins, along with the late Stephen Jay Gould, is one of the most widely read explicators of evolutionary biology in the world. Unlike many of his peers, he takes on with gusto the assertions and beliefs and confusions of creationists, in all their camps. His Blind Watchmaker, 1986, was an earlier attempt to show how evolution — “the nonrandom survival of randomly varying hereditary equipment”, as he calls it — can explain the complexity of all biological beings, including man. There is no need to posit a skilled “watchmaker,” e.g. God, to account for us.
The Greatest Show was written to coincide with the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth, in an effort to close what Dawkins felt was a serious gap left by his previous six books. All of them assumed evolution to be true. “Looking back,” he says, “the evidence for evolution itself was nowhere set out.” Thus this book, an impressive, serious presentation of the current state of knowledge not only of the paleontological evidence but of cell growth and behavior, DNA replication, proteins, enzymes, structural homology, bacterial experimentation and much more. Every chapter deserves second readings, particularly when the material or connections between arguments is new to the reader.
The problem is however, he has another central preoccupation — the worrying success of creationists, with lots of money and well crafted obfuscations, at casting doubt on evolutionary theory and on much of science itself. [42% of American believe life has existed in its present form since the beginning of time, according to a 2008 Pew poll.] The problem is not just one of intellectual disagreement — which Dawkins has had plenty of with Gould and others, but that “when [teachers] explore and explain the very nature of life itself, they are harried and stymied, hassled and bullied, even threatened with the loss of their jobs.” Thus The Greatest Show is written very much with the creationist arguments in mind. Pains are taken to show the silliness of many of them. Winding the two themes together, however, has led to a book that doesn’t quite succeed in either. (more…)
