The Greatest Show On Earth: The Evidence For Evolution
by Richard Dawkins, Bantam Press/Random House, $45
Even some of Richard Dawkins' admirers are critical of his relentless mauling of creationists, especially the Americans. He challenges people to face the facts and, in his latest tome (written amid the howls of rage
and pompous denunciation that The God Delusion left in its wake), he lays out the incontrovertible facts of evolution. He meticulously explains and demonstrates why evolution has the same certainty as the sun being bigger than the moon, Pythagoras' Theorem, continental drift and Paris being in the Northern Hemisphere - not hypothesis, not conjecture, but fact.
Dawkins is anti-religion not because of some mean-spirited vendetta but because "... it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world".
He does occasionally seem to be summing things up as if catering for the simple-minded but the odd bit of patronising doesn't blemish the astonishing truths. He discusses the wonderfully simple explanation of the overlap principle in dendrochronology, how a lump of rock is almost entirely full of empty space, the overwhelming evolutionary evidence contained in fossils, how we are not descended from monkeys, how hippos relate to whales, the endless fascination of DNA, why starlings don't crash, how we self-assemble, why Noah's Ark is such a joke, why Leviticus is such a fraud, why our eyes (and the rest of us) can't possibly be the result of intelligent design, predators and their prey, continental drift ...
It's all a heady revelation for an ignoramus like me but, sadly, psychologically inaccessible for all those history deniers. A classic of our times and, indisputably, "The Greatest Show on Earth".
