Reviewed by Michael Ruse
Published on Friday, Oct. 02, 2009 4:58PM EDT Last updated on Friday, Oct. 09, 2009 5:00PM EDT
Famously, Richard Dawkins has said: “It is absolutely safe to say that, if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I'd rather not consider that).” In his new book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, Dawkins sets out to show why he holds that opinion. When you are finished reading, you may be stupid or insane, perhaps even wicked, but you will certainly not be ignorant.
In making the case for evolution, Dawkins follows the path set about 150 years ago by Charles Darwin in his Origin of Species. First, there is a careful and detailed discussion of the ways in which humans have changed species through selective breeding. So, for instance, paralleling Darwin's discussion of the changes wrought in pigeons, Dawkins tells us about Russian geneticist Dmitri Belyaev, who bred foxes for tameness, and the wondrous changes that came about in just a very few generations – staggering evidence of the power of what today's evolutionists call differential reproduction.
The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, by Richard Dawkins, Free Press, 470 pages, $39.99
Second, like Darwin, Dawkins takes us on a trip through the various branches of biological inquiry – paleontology, biogeography, embryology and more – showing how, in each field, light is thrown by evolution through natural selection and how, in turn, the fields make simply overwhelming the case for what Darwin called descent with modification.
No one can write about science as well as Dawkins, and again and again one is left breathless with admiration for the skills of the storyteller. Even the technical material becomes riveting in his hands, as is shown by his discussion of the work of Michigan State University scientist Richard Lenski on the bacterium Escherichia coli, that micro-organism that occupies your gut – actually that micro-organism times a few billion that occupies your gut at any given time. Taking advantage of this very rapidly reproducing organism, Lenski and his associates have been able to watch (and manipulate) evolution over hundreds of generations, confirming the basic principles of modern Darwinian theory, both the importance of natural selection and of associated phenomena such as random mutation.
I much liked the way that so much of Dawkins's new book is structured around the example or analogy of a detective trying to pin the crime on a culprit. Again and again, critics of evolution complain that one cannot see it in action. Actually, this is not quite true – Lenski's work indeed shows that it is quite false – but in vivid and convincing detail Dawkins shows how very unreliable is eyewitness testimony. In a court of law, what one wants is indirect evidence – the fingerprint, the bloodstains, the broken alibi and so forth. Think of a rape case. Do you want someone picked out from a line or a swab filled with DNA?
“ Dawkins certainly cannot resist telling us again and again how odd (stupid? wicked?) are so many Americans for denying evolution for the sake of their religion ”
It is (the equivalent of) this latter that we get in abundance for evolution – the fossil record, the Galapagos tortoises and finches, the isomorphisms (homologies) between the forelimb of human, horse, bat, bird, porpoise and now, today, the homologies at the molecular level between organisms as different as humans and fruit flies. I am not sure about being wicked, but this is what makes denial of evolution stupid bordering on insanity.
No one's perfect. Dawkins follows the late Ernst Mayr, one of the leading evolutionists of the 20th century, in blaming Plato for the fact that evolutionary ideas did not catch fire in ancient Greece but had to wait until the modern era. Supposedly, Plato's theory of forms, believing that the objects of this world have their nature because of their copying of transcendent ideal standards, absolutely bars change of one organism to another, as, say, when reptiles evolved into birds.
I have never been able to understand Mayr. He was a German, educated at a time when that rightfully meant a deep grounding in the classics. Why did he promote this nonsense? Plato always believed that the objects of this world are transitory and in constant change. Moreover, the reason for his (and Aristotle's) opposition to what we would call evolution was there for all to see. When Empedocles trotted out such views, Aristotle sharply rebuked him, arguing that there is no way that the design-like features of organisms – the hand and the eye – could have come about by blind law.
Paradoxically, Dawkins himself has made this very point, for in an earlier book, The Blind Watchmaker, he argued that before Darwin one could not reasonably be a “fulfilled atheist.” The hand and the eye do seem to call for the Great Designer in the Sky. It was only after Darwin and the mechanism of natural selection that one could see that organisms, in all of their intricate complexity, could indeed be produced by blind law.
Obviously hovering over this new book is Dawkins's recent smash-hit bestseller The God Delusion. He announces at the beginning of The Greatest Show on Earth that he has had his say on religion and now is going to look at the science. This is generally true, but not entirely. Dawkins certainly cannot resist telling us again and again how odd (stupid? wicked?) are so many Americans for denying evolution for the sake of their religion – although he gloomily concedes that things are now not much better in Britain and the rest of Europe, mainly because of the influx of Muslims.
More than this, Dawkins cannot refrain from having another crack at the evolution-is-cruel-and-hence-God-cannot-possibly-exist argument. Associated with this is a fairly detailed discussion of how often organisms are built on what Americans would call Rube Goldberg and the British would call Heath Robinson lines, that is to say cobbled together without regard for the niceties of fine design simply to get things working, probably in the most outlandish way possible. All of this apparently is taken to be a refutation of the God of Christianity.
To which I suspect Christians will respond: Whoever thought they needed Dawkins and evolution to tell them about any of this? The problem of evil goes back a long way before Darwin; this is not to say that it can be solved, but it is to say that evolution does not uniquely have an essential role in refuting Christianity.
Moreover, many Christians think that miraculous creation is simply not the way of the Lord. God is outside time and (as Saint Augustine argued) created by implanting seeds that would then develop naturally. Hence, on theological grounds, one has reason to think that God created through unbroken law, that is to say through evolution.
Were I a Christian, I would be rather inclined to think that the true marvel is that such an apparently ill-conceived set of objects as today's organisms do in fact work as well as they do. The human eye may be a paradox of bad design, with virtually everything back to front or upside down, but truly what a magnificent organ it is – I can see a rainbow, I can delight in the beauty of Grace Kelly (that dates me!), I can read The Greatest Show on Earth. I hope you can too and that you put your abilities to good use and read Richard Dawkins's wonderful new book.
Michael Ruse's next book is Science and Spirituality: Making Room for Faith in the Age of Science. Richard Dawkins will not like it.
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Richard Dawkins vs. the creationistas
Friday, Oct. 02, 2009 10:10AM EDT
Richard Dawkins is the world's atheist-in-chief. His last book, The God Delusion, sold millions of copies and sparked a worldwide debate about the place of religion in a modern world. His new book is defence of the theory of evolution, which has lately come under attack from religious fundamentalists. He spoke to the Globe and Mail's John Barber.
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