Creationists, take note: 'Evidence is evidence!'

British author Richard Dawkins is best known as the fire-breathing atheist who scorched international bestseller lists with The God Delusion in 2006, managing to unite all world religions in the common cause of denouncing him. But Mr. Dawkins's latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution , narrows his focus. "Bishops and theologians who have attended to the evidence for evolution have given up the struggle against it," he writes, transferring his scorn to creationists and advocates of so-called intelligent design, who say that evolution is "only a theory." Mr. Dawkins's response is a tour de force of fact-based rhetoric that makes the scientific truth of the matter more compelling than any religious fable.

The interview began with a discussion of his encounter with creationist Wendy Wright, president of Concerned Women for America, "this extraordinary woman who sticks her fingers in her ears, goes 'la la la' and doesn't actually listen to a word you say."

She says to you, 'Let me ask you, why are you so aggressive? Why is it so important to you that everyone believes like you believe?' Let's start there. Well, I'm not aggressive for a start. This is a myth that's assiduously put about by people who don't have an argument, so they have to fall back on things like that. Of course it's important to me that children especially should not be shielded from the truth about why we all exist. It's so intriguing and fascinating that we now do have a real understanding of why we're here. Isn't that a rivetingly exciting thing? How tragic it is that people are deprived of that by people like her.

You refer to the 40 per cent of Americans who don't believe in evolution. Are they as much a force as you make out? Well, that says it all really. Forty per cent is not that short of 50 per cent, not that short of a majority.

I'm thinking of our readers, for instance. I can't imagine 5 per cent of them or 2 per cent of them believe that. Why should they read your book? Because it's fascinating. I don't mean my book, but the material, the evidence, the facts - some of them very recent - are totally fascinating. Darwin would be riveted by the new evidence that's coming out now.

Of course the material is what this book is about. But reading between the lines, you seem to relish the exposition of it. I love exposition. I feel it's an art form, explaining difficult material, and I like to think that over years of writing and teaching students you hone your skills, and up to a point you get better.

What do you say to the people who aren't in the 40 per cent, who are not fools, but are willing to believe in a completely relativistic world in which these arguments are just points of view? There is a truly pernicious idea going about that everything is just a personal opinion and everybody is equally entitled to their personal opinion whether it fits with the evidence or not - as if there's nothing special about evidence, evidence is just a patriarchal, chauvinistic way of learning about the world.

Evidence is evidence! Evidence is how we know what's true. Of course you can hold views that are contrary to evidence if you want, but don't expect anybody to respect you for it.

Well they do, and they seem to get away with it. People are able to construct alternative realities. Conservapedia, for instance. They do, and it's a battle we've all got to fight. If the people who build our bridges and our planes and our ships and our houses took that view they'd all fall down.

I had an argument with a friend of mine who was taking this relativist view, and she was holding an iPhone. It works! You can be as relativistic as you like, but when you decide to go to a conference of relativist literary critics, for instance, you don't get on a magic carpet, you get on a Boeing 747, which has been built by a lot of engineers for whom two plus two does equal four - and that's that.

Reading your book, the thing that twisted my mind up - and excited me - was this idea of bottom-up creation. It's a little bit like trying to understand infinity. I can't do it. No it's very hard to actually get it into your head. It actually happens on two different levels, both the evolutionary level, in the construction over millions of years of gene pools that give rise to more and more complex beings, but also within each individual, within embryology. Within the life history of each individual there is also a bottom-up construction.

I use the metaphor in the book of flocks of birds, thousands of birds that are all wheeling and turning exactly like one organism, but in fact they are all independently obeying really quite simple rules. That's what happens in the development of a single organism. The cells are like individual birds.

I can understand that, but I can't understand protein molecules behaving that way. Self-assembly is a good phrase. A protein molecule spontaneously twists itself into a preferred shape as a consequence of the linear array of amino acids, which in turn is a consequence of a linear array of genes, of nucleotides in a gene. The genes determine the sequence of amino acids in a protein, and that determines the exact knotted shape into which it coils itself, and that determines its exact chemical activity, its exact catalytic activity, and that determines what happens in cells, and that determines what happens in embryos.

And none of this has ever been planned, none of this is on a drawing board anywhere. It just happens that way. Natural selection chooses those genes that have the consequence of making it happen that way. It's a beautiful, almost panarchic idea, but it works.

You say one of the most compelling pieces of evidence for evolution is that it's a mess, that it's not an intelligent design in some senses. When you look at the outside of an animal you don't see much mess. The outside of an animal is rather elegantly designed, especially if it has to move fast through some medium like air, like a swallow - or through water, like a dolphin. You look on the inside and it does look a bit of a mess. It doesn't look like the kind of thing an engineer would put together.

If you look at the main arteries leading from the heart, superficially it looks like the exhaust manifold of a car. But whereas the exhaust manifold of a car has the pipes coming off regularly spaced, parallel to each other, the pipes coming off the heart go every which way. It's a mess.

You dissected a giraffe recently in order to prove this point. I assisted. I was fascinated by the extraordinary devious routes that's taken by a particular nerve in all mammals. The recurrent laryngeal nerve goes from the brain down into the neck and it should then stop at the voice box, where its end organ is. Instead it goes way down into the chest, loops around one of those same arteries I mentioned, then back up to the voice box. A preposterous detour when you consider it goes straight past the voice box. And it's even more preposterous in a giraffe where the detour is a 15-foot detour.

Is it true that every human fetus has gills? It has slits in the place where gills would be. They don't actually breathe water like fish gills do, but they clearly are homologous, they clearly are the same things as the gills of a fish. They appear in the same way in the embryo and the blood vessels serve them in the same way as they do in the fish's gills. Then most of them disappear as the embryo grows older. Some of them remain as some of the main arteries I was talking about earlier.

What's the one most compelling piece of evidence you would present if you were asked before a judge in a new Scopes trial? I'd be torn between the geographical distribution of animals and plants, which is exactly the way it should be if they'd evolved, rather than placed there by a creator, and comparative molecular genetics. I think I'd probably go for comparative molecular genetics.

The beauty of that is that every living creature that has ever been looked at has the identical genetic code. The machine code of all life is the same - the DNA-protein machine code. It's a digital textual code, and you can look at the coded messages of every animal and every other animal, literally look at the same gene - you know it's the same gene because most of it is the same - and count the minor differences. So you've got a perfect quantitative measure of how much each pair of animals resembles each other and how different they are.

And when you put it all into one big picture, it's a tree, it's a hierarchical, branching tree. And obviously it's a family tree, it's a pedigree. The same tree works for every gene you look at. Every gene could give a different tree, but it doesn't. It gives the same tree.

But this is not persuading the 40 per cent. Do you hope it will? If they would bother to look at the evidence and understand it, it would have to. But as you can see from looking at the transcript of the interview I did with [Ms. Wright] those people do not listen. They stick their fingers in their ears and go 'la la la.'

Do you think this battle is over? It was over when Darwin finished The Origin of Species , as far as intelligent, educated people were concerned. It still is over as far as they're concerned, even more so. It's not over where the willfully ignorant are concerned.

But I think a book like mine is probably best aimed at people who are not willfully ignorant but just pardonably ignorant, as we all are of many things. It's no sin. If people who simply don't know about the evidence are exposed to it, they will understand it and accept it.