Review: The greatest show on earth

Review: The greatest show on earth: The evidence for evolution, by Richard Dawkins. London: Bantam Press. 2009.


In The God delusion Richard Dawkins stated that he was not writing with the intent of converting committed theists but, rather, with the aim of influencing those who were undecided between belief and atheism. After reading The greatest show on earth, I imagine that Dawkins is likewise trying to convince the undecided rather than the hard-core creationists. On the opening page he compares the teacher of evolution to a teacher of Roman history whose class is continually disrupted by "a baying pack of ignoramuses" who vociferously assert that the Roman empire did not exist.
Some might wonder whether a less confrontational tone would be more effective in getting the reader on board. I'm not so sure. Dawkins gives the example of Wendy Wright, the president of 'Concerned Women for America', who was interviewed for the Channel Four documentary The Genius of Charles Darwin. She repeatedly questions the existence of "intermediate" fossils, whilst Dawkins repeatedly ripostes that they are in the museums if only she would care to look. When one listens to Wendy Wright and the many people like her (see some of the risible creationist videos on YouTube) one feels that they are a lost cause.
However, for anyone who is unsure about the case for evolution and is willing to actually read about the evidence, then The greatest show on earth is a brilliant exposition. Each chapter deals with a different aspect of the case and then asks how this could be explained by young earth creationism (creationists who believe that the world was created within the last 10,000 years) or intelligent design (creationism dressed up in the clothing of science).
Along the way Dawkins exposes many of the myths propounded by creationists. For example, although most evolution occurs over millions of years, some evolutionary change can be observed and, indeed, experimentally induced. In one key study, the coloration of guppies evolved to be more or less bright, depending on whether they had been placed in non-predated (or weakly-predated) pools rather than highly-predated pools. Likewise, artifical selection (e.g. dog breeding) is a de facto demonstration that animal forms can change, as opposed to all forms having been place on earth by a creator.
Another myth exposed by Dawkins is that of the "missing" link in the fossil record. Dawkins points out that evolution would be true even if we had no fossils; molecular analyses of existing species demonstrates more clearly than fossils just how different species are related to each other. But we are lucky that any fossil record has survived, and since Darwin's time many "intermediate" fossils have been found, showing the ancestral forms of many living species. Occasionally, some of the fossils in the pre-human lineage get reclassified as an earlier or a later form. However, this actually supports the evolutionary case by showing how close some of the different forms are to each other. In fact, if we had an entirely complete fossil record then it would be impossible to actually classify different forms because the changes between successive generations would be imperceptible.
Dawkins shows throughout how the creationist case has to fall back either on flat denial of the facts or on implausible forms of special pleading. A case in point is the use of radioactive clocks to determine the age of the earth's rocks. Radioactive clocks depend on the half-life of isotopes - the time taken for half the atoms to decay. Potassium-40 has a half-life of 1.26 billion years, but perhaps a creationist could argue that its half-life was different prior to Noah's flood. Special pleading, yes, but the pleading is worse when you bear in mind that other isotopes have different half-lives, so God would need to fiddle all of these in order to show that the earth was created about 6,000 years ago.
One of the most amusing arguments against creationism is that of our interior physiologies. In contrast to the impressive exteriors of all creatures, the insides are frequently a shambles. For example, in mammals the laryngeal nerve does not pass directly from the brain to the larynx but, rather, takes a detour. Most dramatically, in the giraffe the laryngeal nerve passes right down the neck and back up again, a detour of about 15 feet. The reason for this absurdity lies in the evolution that transformed fish ancestors into mammals, which involved the stretching of the neck and the development of other structures.


Throughout The greatest show on earth the writing is crystal clear. The footnotes - so often a distraction in many books - are either illuminating or amusing. Although I knew the basics of evolution, I still learned a lot from this book. Anyone else who is willing to actually be exposed to the evidence for evolution would be well advised to read it.