The Greatest Show on Earth

Title: The Greatest Show on Earth – The Evidence for Evolution
Author: Richard Dawkins
Publisher: Bantam Press 2009 (First)
ISBN: 978-0-593-06174-9
Pages: 437

Undoubtedly one of Dawkins’ master pieces of scientific books! A confirmed atheist and popularizer of science, Dawkins shines supreme among the authors. In addition to the several works he has produced on evolution and the mechanisms by which it works its magic, the present volume is the capstone of them all. As he commented, he was motivated to write a clinching piece of book on the bicentennial year of Darwin’s birth. Evolution is a fact, but surprisingly, there are quite a lot of people with strange ideas like creationism, intelligent design, etc. As the author lists out the results of a survey, 40% of Americans believe in the literal truth of the Bible and that the world was created about 6000 years ago. This book lists so many examples and convincing arguments to establish the truth behind evolution beyond any reasonable doubt. It’d truly astounding if any one continue to vouch for creationism after reading the chapters on skeletal and genetic uniformity among various species.

Change continually happens to animals. This can be artificial, like domestication or spontaneous, like natural selection. The genetic differences imparted on dogs in a very short span of time is immense and the fact that they are genetically evolved from the wolves is difficult to digest now, by just looking at two members of the respective families. If so much change can occur in so short a time, imagine what’d happen if the time available for evolution is large, in fact so huge as to involve billions of years. We have evidence of the elapse of the enormous amount of time from radioactive dating. In addition to such long time scales, evolution can also fact as in the case of the tusk weight of elephants in Africa and in a controlled experiment on frogs on two Adriatic islands done in a span of 37 years. The evidence of evolution is also displayed by fossils and one of the pet arguments of creationists-designers are that there are some missing links. The author strongly refutes such allegations and explains with examples that there are no missing links and every thing is accounted for. We have obtained fossils of intermediate hominids like australopithecus and several home-species to show the intermediate steps when humans evolved from the common ancestor from whom us and chimpanzees diverged. It is not difficult to understand why species diverge, how the so called speciation takes place. When two life forms are separated by islands, not just land surrounded by water, but desert oases, Alpine mountain peaks etc, gradual changes begin to take place such as those seen in Galapagos and Madagascar islands. When these new species encounters the parent species after a sufficiently long span of time, no interbreeding can take place and a new species is established. The process of forming islands is natural in geologic time scales as predicted by plate tectonics. Hence, the mechanism of speciation is clearly proved. The similarities in the bone structure of all vertebrates is striking as exemplified by a comparison between the skulls of a human and a horse. There are 28 bones in the human skull and the structure and number is the same for a horse too, with the difference only in size. The similarities abound in molecular structure of the genes too, as several genes performing the same functions in various animals are in fact similar. The final chapter on ‘intelligent design’ renders an apt and accurate summing up of this old wine in a new bottle, or in other words, creationism in a new garb! Design of animals, if it ever was, is not so intelligent as evidenced in the laryngeal nerve in mammals, the pipe called ‘vas deferens’ which connects testis to the penis. With masterful illustrations, it is made clear that the ‘design’ of these organs are in no way intelligent and if at all they had a designer, he is seriously wanting in intelligence. The animals are cute and elegant only from the outside, and the innards of them are such a mess. This sums up the chain of arguments in the book.

The section on radioactive dating is very illuminating as the detailed mechanism is not described in many books of this genre. Carbon-14 which has a half-life of 5730 years is used for dating fossils of life forms, but for longer duration dating like that of rocks, Potassium-40, which has a half-life of 1.26 billion years is used. In this decay, Potassium-40 is morphed to Argon-40. This section also discusses the controversy surrounding the ‘Shroud of Turin’ which was discovered in the 13^th century claiming to contain a blood stained image of the Christ, but was proved to be a hoax. In 1983, Vatican decided to test the integrity of the piece of cloth in a rare show of scientific temper and allowed three labs in Europe and USA to test the relic with carbon dating. The labs in Arizona, Oxford and Zurich came up with convincing results, 1304 C.E, 1200 C.E and 1274 C.E.

A parody of the song ‘All things bright and beautiful’ praising God for creating all things is given in page 212 and offers excellent humour.

All things dull and ugly
All creatures short and squat
All things rude and nasty
The Lord God made the lot.

Each little snake that poisons
Each little wasp that stings
He made their brutish venom
He made their horrid wings.

All things sick and cancerous
All evil great and small
All things foul and dangerous
The Lord God made them all

Each nasty little hornet
Each beastly little squid
Who made the spiky urchin?
Who made the sharks? He did!

All things scabbed and ulcerous
All pox both great and small
Putrid, foul and gangrenous
The Lord God made them all.

The scientists have come up with a unit for evolution, in a bid to make it quantitative and to bring it in line with the exact sciences. The name of the unit, as expected, is darwin. It is the natural logarithm of a measured characteristic of an animal such as the mean leg length over evolutionary time. It is assessed that the rate of evolution of the horse is approximately 40 millidarwin, where as for some domestic animals including dogs, it is measured in kilodarwin.

The five fastest runners among mammal species are the cheetah, the pronghorn (a kind of antelope), the gnu (another kind of antelope), the lion and the Thomson’s gazelle. It is a mix of the predator and the prey. One thing about such arms races that might worry enthusiasts for intelligent design is the heavy dose of futility that loads them down. If we are going to postulate a designer of the cheetah, he has evidently put every ounce of his designing expertise into the task of perfecting a superlative killer. One look at that magnificent running machine leaves us in no doubt. The cheetah, if we are going to talk design at all, is superbly designed to kill gazelles. But the very same designer has equally evidently strained every nerve to design a gazelle that is superbly equipped to escape from those very same cheetahs. For heaven’s sake, whose side is the designer on? When you look at the cheetah’s taut muscles and flexing backbone, you must conclude that the designer wants the cheetah to win the race. But when you look at the sprinting, jinking, dodging gazelle, you reach exactly the opposite conclusion. Does the designer’s left hand not know what his right hand is doing? Is he a sadist, who enjoys spectator sport and is forever upping the ante on both sides to increase the thrill of the chase? Did he who made the lamb make thee? (p. 384). Powerful argument indeed!

As another illustration of the ‘unintelligence’ of design, animal eye is described. Our retinas consist of photosensitive cells with nerves attached to them. But strangely, the sensors are placed back-to-front and the nerve connections are blocking light from reaching the sensors. It is our brain which filters out poor clarity and presents a good picture. Hermann von Helmholtz, the great nineteenth-century German scientist opined about the deficiencies of the eye thus, “If an optician wanted to sell me an instrument which had all these defects, I should think myself quite justified in blaming his carelessness in the strongest terms, and giving him back the instrument”. The sole motive of creationists is the desire to uphold the origin myth of a particular set of Bronze age desert tribesmen!

A superb book, fully endorsed and recommended. Three profound discoveries, that of DNA as carriers of heredity, plate tectonics which changed the continents of the world and carbon dating of fossils came very much after Darwin published his ‘On the Origin of Species’ in 1859, but each discovery only corroborated his theory rather than presenting even one instance of deviance! This book explains several of them in detail this is a must-have for every man of self-respect.

Rating: 5 Star