The Greatest Show on Earth, Chapter 8

Chapter-by-chapter thoughts on Richard Dawkins’ The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution

by John C. Snider © 2009

Chapter 8: You did it yourself in nine months

One of the most frequent objections to evolution voiced by Creationists is the sheer implausibility of a process that “accidentally” yielded, from a single-celled ancestor billions of years ago, the breathtaking complexity of the human body.  Creationists also like to talk about the stunning mysteries of procreation: how can a baby, with all its intricate pieces and parts, so perfectly develop from the union of sperm and ovum without the guidance of Divine Agency?

I admit to having my moments of speechlessness when pondering the mindboggling complexity of things.  Even a single cell is, as one Creationist put it, “more complicated than a city.”

What is impossible to grasp in its entirety, Dawkins points out, is easier to grasp if one breaks it down into smaller pieces.  It also helps to keep in mind that, just as evolution is an unguided process, so is the development of a living organism.  There is no blueprint, no computer program, that “tells” DNA how and when to build a jellyfish, or a daisy, or a man.  It happens as a synergistic outcome of molecules and cells doing what they do at a local level, following basic chemical or physical rules, and the totality of local actions and interactions becomes…you, or me, or whatever other individual you care to name.

Dawkins goes into some detail about how cells divide and how they “know” to differentiate to become, say, a nerve cell, or a muscle cell.  He also spends some time talking about how much scientists know about cell development from the study of the worm C. elegans, which has exactly 959 cells in its entire body, each of which has been exhaustively identified and profiled.  Although the human body has trillions of cells instead of only 959, the principles of cell development are the same, and much useful information has been derived which has yielded significant benefit for medical science.

(By the way, for an excellent conversation about C. elegans research, listen to episode #59 of the Brain Science Podcast, in which Ginger Campbell interviews Guy Caldwell of the University of Alabama.)

On to Chapter 9…!

The Greatest Show on Earth is available at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk.

Read my thoughts on Chapter 7.

Read my thoughts on Chapter 6.

Read my thoughts on Chapter 5.

Read my thoughts on Chapter 4.

Read my thoughts on Chapter 3.

Read my thoughts on Chapter 2.

Read my thoughts on Chapter 1.