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The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution |  | Author: Richard Dawkins
Publisher: Free Press
Category: Book
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Rating:  197 reviews
Sales Rank: 648
Media: Hardcover
Edition: First Edition
Pages: 480
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Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.8
Dimensions (in): 9.7 x 6.7 x 1.8
ISBN: 1416594787
Dewey Decimal Number: 576.8
EAN: 9781416594789
ASIN: 1416594787
Publication Date: September 22, 2009
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Product Description
In 2008, a Gallup poll showed that 44 percent of Americans believed God had created man in his present form within the last 10,000 years. In a Pew Forum poll in the same year, 42 percent believed that all life on earth has existed in its present form since the beginning of time.In 1859 Charles Darwin's masterpiece, On the Origin of Species, shook society to its core. Darwin was only too aware of the storm his theory of evolution would provoke. But he surely would have raised an incredulous eyebrow at the controversy still raging a century and a half later. Evolution is accepted as scientific fact by all reputable scientists and indeed theologians, yet millions of people continue to question its veracity. Now the author of the iconic work The God Delusion takes them to task. The Greatest Show on Earth is a stunning counterattack on advocates of "Intelligent Design," explaining the evidence for evolution while exposing the absurdities of the creationist "argument." Dawkins sifts through rich layers of scientific evidence: from living examples of natural selection to clues in the fossil record; from natural clocks that mark the vast epochs wherein evolution ran its course to the intricacies of developing embryos; from plate tectonics to molecular genetics. Combining these elements and many more, he makes the airtight case that "we find ourselves perched on one tiny twig in the midst of a blossoming and flourishing tree of life and it is no accident, but the direct consequence of evolution by non-random selection." The Greatest Show on Earth comes at a critical time: systematic opposition to the fact of evolution is menacing as never before. In American schools, and in schools around the world, insidious attempts are made to undermine the status of science in the classroom. Dawkins wields a devastating argument against this ignorance, but his unjaded passion for the natural world turns what might have been a negative argument into a positive offering to the reader: nothing less than a master's vision of life, in all its splendor.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 197
 Interesting, thoughtful, well read, well worth your time March 9, 2010
Irish Lace (St. Louis Missouri)
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
My review is about both the book itself and the audio version read by Dawkins and Lalla Ward.
The book was fascinating. I am a layperson with basic understanding of how science works and why it works, as well as sufficient understanding of evolution to acknowledge it is fact. Having said that, I wanted to understand in greater depth WHY we know what we know about evolution of species.
I got more than I bargained for. The reading of the book by Dawkins and Ward is excellent. Dawkins loves his topic and I think he enjoyed reading it to "us." Ward and he were directed very well so that the material they were reading was easier to follow because of how the two readers shared it. The director did an excellent job.
The material itself is clearly written for the layperson and nobody does that better than Dawkins (Some do it as well. You will also like Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body (Vintage))
Dawkins organized the book to more or less address the common arguments against evolution, as well as to lay out for us why evolution is fact. In other words, it's not just a "denial" of creationism or its ill-disguised alter-ego, "Intelligent Design". It is a clear, concise and accessible walk through the basics of the science of evolution of species.
Side note: Some parts tickled me in that Dawkins so clearly LOOOOVED the topic that he gave himself permission to say exactly as much as he wanted about it, whether we readers would like it or not. He more or less made clear that we "needed" to understand this because HE loved it so he was by gawd going to get deeply into it! One example was his fascinating and detailed discussion of Lenski's experiments with e-coli. The detail may annoy or hang up some readers, but I really enjoyed the sheer humanity of it (as well as the discussion itself, which I thought was amazing.) It was as if he was saying, "OK, kids, this is not a textbook; this is MY book, so you have to hear about how amazing this is!"
I realize that most die-hard biblical creationists won't buy or read this book. And some will read it just to find some flaw they can pick at. I don't care. The book is a gem for those who have a genuine interest in the topic for whatever reason. Unless you yourself are an evolution scientist, you will learn some incredibly interesting things from this well written book. (I bought the hardcover for my husband and one for my son.) Read it. It's very good.
Who denies history? March 5, 2010
H. Schneider (window seat)
5 out of 7 found this review helpful
Unfortunately there seem to be quite a few. I don't know many of them personally, but since there seems to be a correlation to the right wing camp, I must believe that quite a few adults are willing to believe that the world was created less than 10000 years ago. Amazing.
I always enjoy reading Dawkins. Part of the fun is his belligerence, which of course leads to his opponents finding him arrogant. His latest book is sub-titled `the evidence for evolution'. As I didn't feel in need of further evidence, I saw no urgency in reading the book and let it wait in my shelf for a few months. Now I have picked it up with anticipative pleasure and have not been disappointed.
He calls the deniers of evolution, those who claim that it is `just a theory', the deniers of history and puts them in the same drawer as the Holocaust deniers. That's a stroke of polemical genius which was sure to cause excitement, and it probably did. But you know, I can't be bothered. People who still believe that evolution is 'just a theory' are not interesting to me.
The defined target readers for the book are those who feel inadequately prepared to argue the case of evolution with history deniers. I am sure it has done that job, but of course it has done little for those who were on the deniers' side from the start. The numbers of ignorance are rather sobering, according to most polls, as quoted by Dawkins.
I don't 5-star the book for the simple reason that I, personally, did not feel the need for it very strongly. Maybe that's because I do not live in a hotbed of superstition.
 Richard Dawkins, Hitler, and Thermodynamics February 28, 2010
David Roemer (Brooklyn, NY USA)
2 out of 37 found this review helpful
Like many biologists, Richard Dawkins doesn't understand the difference between animals and human beings and why so many philosophers say that God exists. In a textbook used by 65% of all biology majors in the United States, the index includes the phrase "mind-body duality." I'm sure Dawkins and Charles Darwin would find no fault with this explanation:
"And certain properties of the human brain distinguish our species from all other animals. The human brain is, after all, the only known collection of matter that tries to understand itself. To most biologists, the brain and the mind are one and the same; understand how the brain is organized and how it works, and we'll understand such mindful functions as abstract thought and feelings. Some philosophers are less comfortable with this mechanistic view of mind, finding Descartes' concept of a mind-body duality more attractive." (Neil Campbell, Biology, Menlo Park, CA: The Benjamin/Cummings Publishing Company, Inc., 4th edition, p. 776)
That abstract thought is unique to humans is not the only thing there is to know about it. What a biologist more than anyone else should understand is that the knowledge that humans generate abstractions does not come from one of the five senses. This knowledge comes from our ability to make ourselves the subject of our own knowledge. Also, abstract thought cannot be defined or explicated. Consider, for example, knowing the page we are looking at is black and white. This knowing means more than that light is entering our eyes and a signal is going to our brains. It means an awareness of this. This gives rise to the unanswerable question: What is the conscious knowledge of humans as opposed to the sense knowledge of animals? Its unanswerability means humans are indefinabilities that become conscious of their own existence. To quote Shakespeare, "We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep." The infinite abyss we are surrounded by when we contemplate our own existence is incomprehensible. Some say this mysterious part of self-knowledge is God.
René Descartes attempted to explain why a human is able to control its body as if it is a possession. This question is called the mind-body problem. According to Descartes a human consists of two different beings, like a stagecoach with a driver and a team of horses. Cartesian dualism is inconsistent with the metaphysical truth that a human being is one being, not two beings. It is a matter of common sense that human beings are embodied spirits. Body and soul are metaphysical principles or incomplete beings that explain why humans are equal to one another but at the same time different from one another. This is why evolution applies only to the bodies of humans, not their souls. The cosmological proof of God's existence comes from the metaphysical analysis of the finitude of beings.
Some knowledgeable people say the proof of God is just an argument. I don't agree because that implies you have to decide whether to be an atheist, theist, or agnostic. I don't see any reason to make such a decision. Jean-Paul Sartre is supposed to have been an atheist, but this is what he said:
"Thus the passion of man is the reverse of that of Christ, for man loses himself as man in order that God may be born. But the idea of God is contradictory and we lose ourselves in vain. Man is a useless passion." (Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, New York: Washington Square Press, p. 784)
What we have to decide is whether or not God has revealed himself to mankind, regardless of how incomprehensible, contradictory, and hypothetical God may be. This decision is as personal and emotional as the decision to live the life of a selfish libertine or a virtuous ascetic. It is the connection between this decision and evolutionary biology that clouds the discussions about evolution and fuels the controversy about teaching evolution in schools. This is Dawkins discussing evolution reasonably:
"By the time Darwin came to publish On the Origin of Species in 1859, he had amassed enough evidence to propel evolution itself, though still not natural selection, a long way towards the status of fact. Indeed, it was this elevation from hypothesis towards fact that occupied Darwin for most of his great book. The elevation has continued until, today, there is no longer any doubt in any serious mind, and scientists speak, at least informally, of the fact of evolution. All reputable biologists go on to agree that natural selection is one of its most important driving forces, although --as some biologists insist more than others--not the only one. Even if it is not the only one, I have yet to meet a serious biologist who can point to an alternative to natural selection as a driving force of adaptive evolution--evolution towards positive improvement." (p. 18)
What Dawkins calls the "fact of evolution" is also called common descent. Adaptation and common descent are two separate phenomena. Adaptation refers to the ancient observation that species are adapted to their environment, and common descent refers to the 20th century discovery that all species evolved from a single prokaryote over a period of 3.5 billion years. I consider it significant that Dawkins does not refer to the complexity of life in the above summary. There was not much of an increase in complexity when natural selection caused polar bears to acquire only hair without pigment, but complexity increased considerably when fish evolved into mammals. By using the adjective "adaptive" and the phrase "positive improvement" and by not mentioning complexity, Dawkins is saying that natural selection explains adaptation only and does not explain common descent.
The reason natural selection can't explain common descent is that a living organism is presumably a collection of molecules and atoms and subject to the second law of thermodynamics. According to this law, there is a tendency for molecular systems to go towards a state of greater disorder and less complexity. In the free expansion of a gas, for example, there is a decrease in complexity because there is less knowledge about the location of each gas molecule. In a protein, there is a high degree of complexity because the location of every amino acid in the protein is known exactly. This limitation on natural selection is explained in a peer-reviewed paper titled, "Conflict between the idea of natural selection and the idea of uniqueness of the gene does not seem to be near a solution yet" (Nature, Vol. 224, 1969, p. 342). This paper calculates the small probability of a protein composed of three hundred amino acids evolving by random chance. I'm unaware of any biology textbook, peer-reviewed paper, or scholarly work that states natural selection explains the increase in the complexity of organisms. With the exception of advocates of intelligent design, I also don't know of any biologists that attempt to draw the line between adaptation and common descent.
In this passage, Dawkins gives a different account of natural selection. The word adaptive is dropped and an explanation for the complexity of life is given:
"When creationists say, as they frequently do, that the theory of evolution contradicts the Second Law of Thermodynamics, they are telling us no more than that they don't understand the Second Law (we already knew that they don't understand evolution). There is no contraction, because of the sun!
"...energy from the sun powers life, to coax and stretch the laws of physics and chemistry to evolve prodigious feats of complexity, diversity , beauty, and an uncanny illusion of statistical improbability and deliberate design...Natural selection is an improbability pump: a process that generates the statistically improbable. It systematically seizes the minority of random changes that have what it takes to survive, and accumulates them, step by tiny step over unimaginable timescales, until evolution eventually climbs mountains of improbability and diversity, peaks whose height and range seem to know no limit, the metaphorical mountain that I have called `Mount Improbable'...Life evolves greater complexity only because natural selection drives it locally away from the statistically probable towards the improbable." (p. 415)
According to the Bible, especially John 1:1-2 ("In the beginning was the Word: the Word was with God"), God created the universe ex nihilo. Hence, the lack of a scientific understanding of the Big Bang, and to a lesser extent, the origin of life and evolution is one of the reasons to believe in the Bible and the Koran. Dawkins is aware of this reasoning and it probably causes the author of The God Delusion to overstate the scientific understanding of these three phenomena. In the above quote, he is saying natural selection explains common descent. Dawkins's analysis reveals a lack of understanding of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. When a plant grows, its complexity increases because the complexity of the sun decreases, not its energy.
You can see this same mind-set at work in his discussion of J. B. S. Haldane's answer to a question posed at a public lecture:
"Evolution skeptic: Professor Haldane, even given the billions of years that you say were available for evolution, I simply cannot believe it is possible to go from a single cell to a complicated human body, with its trillions of cells organized into bones and muscles and nerves, a heart that pumps without ceasing for decades, miles and miles of blood vessels and kidney tubules, and a brain capable of thinking and talking and feeling.
"JBS: But madam, you did it yourself. And it only took you nine months." (p. 211)
"J. B. S. Haldane spoke simple truth to his skeptical questioner, but he would not have denied that there is mystery, verging on the miraculous (but never quite getting there) in the very fact that a single cell gives rise to a human body in all its complexity." (p. 217)
Notice that Dawkins associates lack of scientific knowledge ("mystery") with a sign from God ("miraculous"). Also notice he doesn't realize that Haldane's answer was not an answer at all but gave another reason to be an "evolution skeptic." Haldane in effect pointed out another thing that had to evolve besides "miles of blood vessels," i.e., the development of a grown human from the initial fertilized egg over a period of 15 to 20 years. Human brains, for example, grow bigger after birth so the fetus can get through a pelvis narrow enough for upright walking. According to the theory of natural selection, I suppose, babies with small heads had a better chance of surviving than babies with big heads because their mothers were more likely to survive their birth.
The following is another example of Dawkins's scientism because he must be thinking of the Big Bang and must be thinking the Big Bang solves something:
"...Darwin went on to say, `It is mere rubbish, thinking at present of the origin of life; one might as well think of the origin of matter.' He didn't rule out the possibility that the problem would eventually be solved (indeed, the problem of the origin of matter largely has been solved)..." (p. 417, emphasis added)
Another example of wishful thinking is his discussion of the origin of life:
"We have no evidence about what the first step in making life was, but we do know the kind of step it must have been. It must have been whatever it took to get natural selection started. Before the first step, the sorts of improvement that only natural selection can achieve were impossible. And that means the key step was the arising, but some process as yet unknown, of a self-replicating entity." (p. 419)
Dawkins repeatedly refers to creationist as history-deniers, but he denies a lot of history himself:
"The popular canard about Hitler being inspired by Darwin comes partly from the fact that both Hitler and Darwin were impressed by something that everybody has known for centuries: you can breed animals for desired qualities...Don't be mislead by the ill-chosen and unfortunate subtitle of Darwin's great book: The preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life." (p. 62)
Darwin said humans are superior to animals, not because humans have spiritual souls, but because humans are more intelligent and civilized. The idea that humans don't have souls means humans are not equal under God. This negation of human equality leads to the idea that some individuals are more useful to humanity than other individuals and that some human races are more evolved than other human races. The following quote justifies calling Darwin the founder of the eugenics movement:
"If the various checks specified in the last two paragraphs, and perhaps others as yet unknown, do not prevent the reckless, the vicious and the otherwise inferior members of society from increasing at a quicker rate than the better class of men, the nation will retrograde, as has too often occurred in the history of the world. We must remember that progress is no invariable rule." (Charles Darwin, [i]Descent of Man[/i], Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998, p. 145)
In the United States, 65,000 handicapped individuals were forcibly sterilized in 33 states in order to improve the human race. In Germany, over 400,000 were sterilized in similar programs. The link between Darwin and Hitler is Ernst Haeckel, who was Darwin's advocate in Germany and who said things like this repeatedly:
"...the difference between the highest and the lowest humans is greater than that between the lowest humans the highest animal." (From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany Richard Weikart, , p. 105)
Humanism is the philosophy that our purpose in life is not to serve God and hope for salvation, but to serve mankind and strive for self-realization. Darwinism is the pseudo-scientific foundation of humanism, which caused many well-intentioned people to find meaning in life by joining various political and social movements. Richard Dawkins finds meaning in his life by promoting humanism.
 This book doesn't prove evolution by natural selection created life on earth February 25, 2010
L. Sayers
1 out of 15 found this review helpful
As I prepared to read this volume I expected that some new compelling evidence had been found that absolutely proved evolution beyond a shadow of a doubt, however was greatly dissapointed. In summary, I did not find anything new in this book that has not already been discussed or presented before. The "must have" evidence to support evolution is the existence of transition fossils, indeed even Darwin expressed that the absence of "GRADATED" transition fossils is a "grave concern" for his theory ("gradated" is key here). Bottom line is that gradated transition fossils that show the evolution of one species into another MUST be presented. I understand the difficulty with this in that few fossils are formed, however this still does not take away that these must be presented otherwise one can easily conclude that a species was produced independently. The "transition fossils" that Professor Dawkins presents certainly could form some linkage in the so called "Tree of Life" but are some way off being the gradated transition fossils that Darwin demanded must be found. Dawkin's was right in that there is simply too big a gap to conclude that these fossils represent an intermediate species in the transition of one species to another. This is surely a fair criticism. Next we come to the evolving lizards that were supplanted on the island & that transformed in features over 37 years. Again, this only shows how animals are adaptable & have the physiological machinery to adapt to a changing environment. There is no evidence of genetic mutation combined with natural selection at work here but just a shifting of genes in the gene pool to form lizards that are more in tune for life in their new environment. Again, we do not see a transition of one species to another species, which is what must be shown for evolution through natural selection to be concluded as the driving force of the change. Another of Professor Dawkin's arguments is the high sequence homology of the genetic code across species, that he claims to prove that species descended from a common ancestor. It is a nice theory but this commonality doesn't prove this at all, but provides circumstantial evidence (weak at that). Think about it, if there was indeed a Divine Creator at work then it makes complete sense that he would use similar DNA sequences, genes & proteins across species to code for proteins that work to ensure the survivability of the species on earth. Cars manufactured by different auto companies all use wheels, exhaust pipes & carburetta's but it doesn't mean they descended from a single car. They have a designer who uses designs that simply work across different models. Of course, the Designer would extrapolate genes encoding important proteins across the whole Tree of Life - this makes absolute sense. I think the most controversial chapter is the one where Professor Dawkins argues that there can be no God based on all the wastage there is in the world....trees growing to unessessary high hights to compete, predators & prey continually competing against one another in the economy of nature to outpace the other, & (arguably the best one of all) the cruelty that animals inflict on one another. It may be worth reading the Bible here to better understand who God really is & what line of business he is in (saving man's soul). Given that God uses animals in the Mosaic sacrificial system I hardly think cruely inflicted by one animal to the next is really top of his agenda, although there are a couple of Scriptures that condemn unessessary cruely inflicted by a human to an animal (& rightly so). Most unbelievable of all is the argument that the imperfections in human physiology (back to front retina, excessively long vas deferens, lower back pain etc) support the concept that there can be no God, since God wouldn't have got this wrong is he existed. Professor Dawkin's has completely missed the amazing perfection & detail of the human body & singles out a back to front retina as a major flaw...this is truly spiritual blindness! How is your eyesight? I bet it's pretty good isn't it? So what about the lower back pain? Well, Romans 5:12 provides the answer & tells us that death (& disease) entered the human race at the Fall of Man, which provides a Biblical explanation of all the imperfections, aches, pains & diseases we unfortunately must suffer, together with mortality. Finally, I see that Professor Dawkins leave the most important question until last, that is, how did life get started in the first place. Unfortunately, evolution by natural selection demands an answer to this question in his book, but Professor Dawkin's completely minimizes the importance of this critical question, putting it down to mere chance (& a little bit of RNA). If you tried to use that rationale in a quality scientific journal, I think it's safe to say that your paper would be rejected! We must face the facts here, if you look with an open heart at the three dimensional structure of DNA (together with its perfectly entwined histone complexes) & can truly say there can be no God, you probably need to reconsider reality. We could even term a personal who thinks this as a "Reality denier". Having said all of this, I do think the book is well written & humorous in places (which is why I gave it 2 stars & not 1). The only problem is that Professor Dawkin's is fairly insulting to the very people he is supposed to be reaching out to i.e. the 40 percenters, the "History Deniers". This is probably not the best approach & shows that he probably didn't ever intend to try to change their minds but merely to vent his anger & frustration at them through his book. I think to really understand whether evolution through natural selection could have played a part in the formation of life on earth, we need to drill down to the biochemistry of life, which is something Professor Dawkins doesn't really touch upon in any depth....let's move onto "Darwin's Black Box" & resume the debate....
 Well written, entertaining and fact (not fiction) February 22, 2010
C. Lindberg
2 out of 7 found this review helpful
It rather disturbs me that books like this are necessary. The reality-deniers persist, trying to force their thunder gods and sky demons on us. This book provides the ammunition you'll need to defend yourself from the onslaught. Professor Dawkins presents the overwhelming evidence in favor of evolution in easily understood terms. This is less aggressive than some of his past writing and instead focuses on the science. This is more about common sense and rational thinking, less about revealing the absurdity of Creationist claims.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 197
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