Book Review: The Greatest Show On Earth by Richard Dawkins

Back in the spring (see post for May 9, 2009) I reviewed Jerry Coyne’s excellent Why Evolution Is True, a book that runs through all the strands of evidence for evolution. Last month Richard Dawkin’s book on the same theme, The Greatest Show On Earth: The Evidence For Evolution, was published. This is a much bigger book than Coyne’s and illustrated with 32 colour pages. Whilst it covers the same ground Dawkins presents the material in a very different way with different examples and has a very different, more literary style with more digressions and anecdotes. There’s much more detail and information too. Early on Dawkins demolishes the idea that because it’s called the theory of evolution it isn’t proven and the rest of the book is about showing why it’s a fact. (As an aside, I’m not sure about his invention of the word theorum as a substitute for theory to avoid confusion with the non-scientific meaning of the latter as speculation or conjecture). Dawkins then goes on to discuss the gene pool and artificial selection (a nod to Darwin who began The Origin of Species with artificial selection); macro-evolution; natural selection; the measurement of time by tree rings, radioactive clocks and carbon dating; evolution in the laboratory (I was fascinated by the description of a long-term experiment with bacteria that shows evolution in action); the fossil record; human evolution; embryology; biogeography (with praise for Jerry Coyne for a “masterful treatment” of this in Why Evolution Is True); molecular biology, vestigial traits and much, much more. I found the book fascinating, satisfying and enriching as I think would anyone interested in natural history and how life evolved.

Richard Dawkins being a hugely successful writer and a somewhat controversial figure The Greatest Show On Earth has been extensively reviewed. I read many of these reviews before reading the book and again after reading it. With a few exceptions the impression I gained was of reviewers who had at most skimmed through the book, looking mainly for attacks on creationists, and then reviewed it based on their opinion of the author and his anti-religion book The God Delusion. Few discussed the book they were meant to be reviewing in any depth or detail. Some appeared not to understand what it was about or why it had been written. Happily, such is Dawkins popularity (which in itself seems to annoy some reviewers) the book has been a great success, which it deserves.

How does it compare with Why Evolution Is True and which one would I recommend to someone wanting to learn about evolution? Well, I’d recommend both! But to a complete novice with no knowledge of biology or natural history I would suggest reading Jerry Coyne first as his book is more succinct and the information is more simply presented. I can imagine the Dawkins being a little daunting if it was the first book on the subject someone had ever picked up. But it should certainly be read next, to provide more information and detail and just because it is a beautifully written and wonderful book.

Richard Dawkins has an interesting website with an active, entertaining and informative forum. Many of the reviews of the book I found on this website.

Book Review: Why Evolution Is True by Jerry A. Coyne

The story of the earth and its life has always fascinated me. From my first childhood ventures into nature I’ve always had a desire to understand how the places, animals and plants I saw came to be. Brought up on the Lancashire coast at Formby I quickly learnt that the landscape and its wildlife were not permanent. Shifting sand dunes, “slacks” that flooded after rain and turned dusty in droughts, a maze of tidal channels that varied constantly and could easily trap the unwary, visiting flocks of waders that could number hundreds one day and a handful the next – all these and more showed me that nature was always changing. When I first read about the formation of landscapes and the evolution of life it made perfect sense. What books I read back then I cannot remember now, maybe it was the ones I still have – “The Observer’s Book of Geology” by I.O.Evans (no date but purchased sometime in the early 1960s) and “Fossils Amphibians and Reptiles” by W.E.Swinton, British Museum of Natural History, Third Edition 1962.

Since those days I’ve read, at intermittent intervals, a series of books on geology and evolution by a variety of authors. I’ve particularly enjoyed the writing of Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, Richard Fortey, E.O.Wilson and Steve Jones. However, marvellous though the works of these writers are, there is none that serves as a basic introduction to evolution that could be recommended to anyone who wants to learn about the subject. Now that gap has been filled admirably by evolutionary biologist Jerry A. Coyne’s Why Evolution Is True, a well-written account that covers clearly and logically the over-whelming evidence for evolution. The fossil record, vestigial traits, embryology (I’ve always been intrigued and delighted by the way embryos show links with distant ancestors and Coyne covers this particularly well with some wonderful examples), imperfections that could only come from bad design if there was a designer but which are perfectly explicable by evolution, biogeography, natural selection, sexual selection, speciation and the evolution of homo sapiens are all covered thoroughly yet succinctly. Anyone who can read this book and not accept the evidence for evolution must have a closed mind. I found it an enjoyable and interesting read, with many examples I had not come across before despite all my previous reading. It also makes a good book for reference and quick revision.

The author provides a good further reading list that includes online sources. One that has appeared since the book was published is Jerry Coyne’s own blog, with the same name as the book. It’s well worth a look.

Richard Dawkins: The Purpose of Purpose

The Edinburgh International Science Festival is an excellent annual event with a series of lectures and activities. If I lived in Edinburgh I’d attend many of them. As an occasional visitor I’ve only managed a few and this year I attended just one lecture, as most of the festival took place while I was living in igloos in the Rockies. But this lecture was well worth the journey south just two days after returning from Wyoming as it was by Richard Dawkins. Over the years I’ve read and been impressed by many of Richard Dawkins’ books and seen his TV programmes but I’d never heard him give a talk before.

As a speaker Dawkins is both authoritative and accessible. The brilliant intellect is clearly there but without a sense of superiority or arrogance. The talk, entitled The Purpose of Purpose, was packed with information and ideas – I’ve thought about it every day since – but there was also some humour to lighten the tone, including a short video of a creationist explaining that a banana had been designed to fit the human hand and mouth. Dawkins pointed out that the modern cultivated banana is actually a very different shape to the wild original and that it has come about due to artificial selection by humans.

Humans are obsessed with purpose and like to ask "why" even if it's an irrelevant or meaningless question. What, Dawkins asked, is the purpose of this desire to find purpose?

Artificial selection, said Dawkins, with references to the cultivation of corn and roses, continues from natural selection. Using pollination as an example he showed how plants range from those reliant on the vagaries of the wind to spread their pollen to a plant whose pollen only one species of moth with a very long thin tongue can reach. This adaptation by natural selection has the purpose of ensuring the genes of the organism survive and continue. Dawkins calls this archi-purpose. There is no plan or design involved, just natural selection.

Much that people do does not have an obvious or clear archi-purpose however. Several examples were given to illustrate this, including adoption, which doesn’t help the survival of the genes of the adoptive parents in any way. Purpose here is intentional and planned and comes from our ability to think, which in turn comes from the evolution of our big brains. Dawkins calls this neo-purpose. Neo-purpose isn’t exclusive to people either. Machines can have it too, which Dawkins illustrated with a video of a guided missile. Such a missile, he said, seeks a target, unlike, say a cannonball, which has no built-in goal.

Neo-purpose can be positive or negative. In one of the most interesting sections of his talk Dawkins discussed the flexibility we have in directing and changing our behaviour. This flexibility means we can change our aims away from archi-purpose, though once we have a neo-purpose a degree of inflexibility is then needed to achieve it. This could be in the service of rigid religious or political beliefs. Inside this inflexibility flexible short-term goals could be set that might subvert the original aim. To show this Dawkins referred to the film The Bridge Over The River Kwai in which a character subverts his main aim of opposing the enemy by wanting to build as good a bridge for the enemy as possible, justifying this by claiming it will show superiority.

Next came the idea of fictive kinship, in which non-kin relationships subvert real kinship and replace it. This can lead to blind obedience to religious or political “kins”. Escaping from archi-purpose can be positive too, though, with cultural evolution having led quickly from the invention of the wheel to the space shuttle. This has enabled humanity to progress rapidly. At the finish Dawkins said that his take-home message was that neo-purpose was itself an evolutionary adaptation.

After the talk Richard Dawkins answered questions from the audience. I thought he was especially impressive here as he revealed the depth of his knowledge and his desire to explain clearly his ideas.

Three of us had attended the lecture, two of us familiar with Dawkins books and ideas, though we were still given much to think about. The third member of the party, a 20 year old art student, had never read any of his books. However she was so impressed by the talk that afterwards she was excitedly asking which ones she should read first. That’s how good it was.

Darwin Day

This post is to celebrate Charles Darwin who was born two hundred years ago today and whose book On The Origin Of Species changed the way we understand nature and our place in it. I can’t remember when I first heard of Darwin or natural selection and the theory of evolution. They seem to have been part of my life forever. Probably though it was when I was ten or eleven as that is when I started to study natural history, reading books on rocks, plants and animals, watching birds, dabbling in ponds and collecting shells, rocks, insects and anything else I found. My bedroom window shelf was covered with old glass sweet jars containing pond life – tadpoles, great diving beetle larvae, water scorpions, whirligig beetles, ramshorn snails and more while my cupboards were full of cardboard boxes containing neatly labelled sea shells and insects and on my desk were notebooks detailing what I saw and collected in neat lists. On television I watched programmes with David Attenborough, Gerald Durrell, Hans and Lotte Hass and other TV naturalists. From my first readings I grasped that all life is related and has evolved from common ancestors. I also understood that human beings were animals too and just as much part of nature as frogs or woodlice. Being interested in history as well as nature I’ve always liked knowing where ideas come from and how they develop so I read the stories of how our knowledge of the natural world came about and learnt of the importance of Darwin and evolution.

Since those days I have continued my interest in nature, though my boyhood desires to be a scientist died long ago, crushed by the boring science lessons of secondary school, dull chemistry and physics that seemed to bear no relation to the real world and taught by teachers whose only interest appeared to be exam results. For years I didn’t even realise that there was any connection between school science lessons and the natural history I continued to study. Over the years I’ve read many books on evolution and Darwin and those who followed him and amassed the overwhelming evidence, still growing daily, that proves he was correct but I never attempted to read Darwin’s major work itself, the closest being Steve Jones’s modern (and excellent) reworking Almost Like A Whale. I read the eloquent and literary essays of Stephen Jay Gould, the books of Richard Dawkins (The Ancestor’s Tale is a wonderful conceit that works well) and Richard Fortey (whose Life: An Unauthorised Biography is superb) and articles in New Scientist but not On The Origin Of Species. This year I intend to put that right.

The idea that we are part of nature, part of the world and not some superior being planted on it by an outside force has always seemed to me both obvious and wonderful. Perhaps it is why I have never felt lonely when spending weeks by myself in wild country. Instead I feel I am at home, where I belong. Darwin put it beautifully in the famous and stirring last lines of The Origin of Species:

“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful, have been, and are being, evolved”.