The Greatest Show On Earth

Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show On Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, Free Press, 2009. 437 Pages

In the 150 years since the publication of Charles Darwin's landmark book, "On the Origin of Species," researchers have accrued massive amounts of evidence in support of evolution and the mechanics behind the process. Yet today only 4 in 10 Americans believe that evolution occurred. Only the Islamic countries approach Americans in this position on evolution.

British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, has for decades written best-selling books on evolutionary processes and has repeatedly called for rational public thinking on the matter. This book may not be a text book, but it sure seems thorough enough to serve that purpose. Another book that belongs in your personal library.

My Notes:

Pg. 9: The Oxford English Dictionary gives two meanings for a theory:

Theory Sense 1: A scheme or system f ideas or statements held as an explanation or account of a group of facts or phenomena; a hypothesis that has been confirmed or established by observation or experiment, and is propounded or accepted as accounting for the known facts; a statement of what are held o be the general laws, principles, or causes of something known or observed.

Theory Sense 2: A hypothesis proposed as an explanation; hence, a mere hypothesis, speculation, conjecture; an idea or set of ideas about something; an individual view or notion.
Obviously the two meanings are quite different from one another. Scientists are using Sense 1 when referring to the ‘theory of evolution’; creationist use Sense 2.

Pg 17: Biologists often make a distinction between the fact of evolution (all living things are cousins), and the theory of what drives it (they usually mean natural selection, and they may contrast it with rival theories such as Lamarck’s theory of ‘use and disuse’ and the ‘inheritance of acquired characteristics’). But Darwin himself thought of both as theories in the tentative, hypothetical, conjectural sense. This was because, in those days, the available evidence was less compelling and it was still possible for reputable scientists to dispute both evolution and natural selection. Nowadays it is no longer possible to dispute the fact of evolution itself – it has graduated to become obviously supported fact – but it could still (just) be doubted that natural selection is its major driving force.

Pg. 81: Life began tens of millions of centuries ago. The measured age of our planet is about 4.6 billion years, or about 46 million centuries. The time that has elapsed since the common ancestor of all today’s mammals walked the Earth is about two million centuries. The time that has elapsed since our fish ancestors crawled out of the water on to the land is about three and a half million centuries: that is to say, about twenty thousand times as long as it took to make all the different – really very different - breeds of dogs from the common ancestor that they all share.

Pg. 186: Relatively recently, maybe less than 100,000 years ago, roving bands of Homo sapiens looking pretty much like us left Africa and diversified into all the races that we see around the world today: Inuit, native Americans, native Australians, Chinese, and so on. It is to this recent exodus that the phrase ‘out of Africa’ is normally applied. But there was an earlier exodus from Africa, and these erectus pioneers left fossils in Asia and Europe, including the Java and Peking specimens.

Pg. 256: Geographically separated gene pools of the same species will eventually drift apart from one another, to the point where they can no longer interbreed when the geographical isolation eventually comes to an end. Random changes in the two gene pools will gradually build up, to the point where, if a male and a female from the two sides meet, their genomes will be too different to combine to make a fertile offspring. They are then two different species.

Pg. 429: At irregular but frequent intervals since 1982, Gallup, America’s best-known polling organization, has been sampling the national opinion on this question:

Which of the following statements comes closest to your views on the origin and development of human beings?

1. Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process. (36%)

2. Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process. (14%)

3. God crated human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so. (44%).
The inserted percentages are from 2008. The figures for 1982, 1993, 1997, 1999, 2001, 2004, 2006, and 2007 are pretty much the same.
Note: of all the western countries, Turkey included as it is the only Islamic country wanting to join the European union, Turkey is closest to this U.S. 44% position on question number 3. Much less percentages prevail in all other western countries.