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

by John C. Snider © 2009

Chapter 13: There is grandeur in this view of life

Well, here we are: the big finish.  Dawkins chooses to close his book by taking the last half of the last paragraph of Charles Darwin’s magnum opus On the Origin of Species and offering his own ruminations one each phrase.  It’s a little awkward, to be honest; in the end, it comes across like the overly-detailed commentaries offered by fundamentalist evangelicals, where they provide whole essays on the meaning and context of each word in a Bible verse.

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

by John C. Snider © 2009

Chapter 12: Arms races and ‘evolutionary theodicy’

More bad news for the Creationists.  Not only is the Creator apparently whimsical and inept–He is also heartless and cruel!

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

by John C. Snider © 2009

Chapter 11: History written all over us

Creationists will find it increasingly difficult to explain away the evidence presented in the later chapters of this book.  In Chapter 11, Dawkins shows how our bodies–and those of our animal “cousins”–show not only common ancestry, but the wondrous and inefficient ways in which we have evolved.

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

by John C. Snider © 2009

Chapter 10: The tree of cousinship

Homology.  The fact that, say, mammals all share the same basic body plan, and that each species is more or less a variation on a theme, could either be evidence of shared ancestry, or evidence or a shared Creator.  Dawkins points out that bats and humans (for example) share the same skeletal structure, nearly bone for bone; the differences in the relative proportions.

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

by John C. Snider © 2009

Chapter 9: The ark of the continents

Dawkins points out that geography has a profound impact on evolution: the landscape can either allow species to interact, or it can prevent them from interacting.  In the latter case–what Dawkins calls “islands” (be they actual islands or metaphorical ones)–it can lead to new species branching off from existing species.

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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?

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

by John C. Snider © 2009

Chapter 7: Missing persons?  Missing no longer

I am not a biologist, nor am I an anatomist, much less a paleoanthropologist.  So when a scientist shows me a reconstructed skull and breathlessly talks about its similarities or differences to a human skull, or a chimpanzee skull…well, to some extent I’ll just have to take his word for it.

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

by John C. Snider © 2009

Chapter 6: Missing link?  What do you mean, ‘missing’?

Okay, now the rubber hits the road.  As Dawkins points out, we would know evolution was true even if we never found a single fossil.  Nonetheless, given that there are fossils, the predictive power of the theory of evolution can be–and has been–thoroughly tested.

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

by John C. Snider © 2009

Chapter 5: Before our very eyes

This chapter is both a necessary step in covering the gamut of arguments in favor of evolution and the step that will least impress dyed-in-the-wool Creationists.  Dawkins does a good job of explaining some ingenious experiments that demonstrate just how rapidly evolutionary change can occur.  He describes a decades-long (and still ongoing) experiment involving E. coli bacteria, and another involving wild guppies in South America.  Both experiments show conclusively that natural selection exerts powerful influence on the development of species.

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

by John C. Snider © 2009

Chapter 4: Silence and slow time

Oooh, the colors!  The Greatest Show on Earth boasts four sections of full-color illustrations, which is very cool (and probably explains the book’s $30 cover price).  Anyway, the first section of illustrations is bound into the middle of Chapter 4.

How do we know the earth is 4.6 billion years old?  Creationists, of course, claim it’s as little as 6,000 years old, and they have all sorts of clever-sounding-but-not-so-clever-actually arguments.  One of their most common plaints is that carbon-14 dating is rife with inaccuracy.  Dawkins reminds us, however, that carbon-14 (which has a  half-life of about 5,700 years) is useful primarily in determining the age of things that are less than, say, 60,000 years old.  In other words, carbon-14 is not used to determine the age of 10o-million-year-old dinosaur fossils.

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