A Raconteur of Nature’s Back Story
By SARAH LYALL
October 19, 2009 / The New York Times
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“The Greatest Show on Earth” is a lucid, thorough and often exciting survey of evolution, and takes in rats’ teeth, dogs, bacteria, the so-called missing link, crustaceans, giraffe anatomy, hummingbirds, chimpanzees, enzymes — you name it. It is informed in nearly every paragraph by Mr. Dawkins’s irrepressible enthusiasm.
...
Here was a perfect illustration of a point he makes in “The Greatest Show on Earth”: that there is no Platonic ideal of any animal, but rather countless variations on a theme.
“You get the wonderful feeling of the beetle body being drawn out and pulled in all directions,” he said affectionately. “It’s kind of like modeling clay. They’re all descended from an ancestral beetle, and all the bits are there,” he added, “and yet they’re being stretched this way and kneaded that way and pushed that way and bent this way. Once you get it, evolution becomes so obvious.”
Why write a guide to evolution now, when there are already so many books on the topic, some of them by Mr. Dawkins?
For one thing, 2009 is the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth, and the 150th anniversary of his book “On the Origin of Species.” For another, “The Greatest Show on Earth” is Mr. Dawkins’s own “missing link,” he said, filling in the gaps in his previous works. While earlier books assumed that readers understood the scientific basis for evolution, this one lays it out directly.
Mr. Dawkins already deployed ample indignation against creationists and others of their ilk in “The God Delusion,” so he has less time for all that in his new book. But he does reserve a corner of his contempt for those he calls “history deniers,” who contend that evolution is a hoax and who are, he says, akin to Holocaust deniers.
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"Evolution All Around" by Nicholas Waide, October 8, 2009 / The New York Times
Official Site of Richard Dawkins
Official channel of Richard Dawkins on YouTube.com
By SARAH LYALL
October 19, 2009 / The New York Times
...
“The Greatest Show on Earth” is a lucid, thorough and often exciting survey of evolution, and takes in rats’ teeth, dogs, bacteria, the so-called missing link, crustaceans, giraffe anatomy, hummingbirds, chimpanzees, enzymes — you name it. It is informed in nearly every paragraph by Mr. Dawkins’s irrepressible enthusiasm.
...
Here was a perfect illustration of a point he makes in “The Greatest Show on Earth”: that there is no Platonic ideal of any animal, but rather countless variations on a theme.
“You get the wonderful feeling of the beetle body being drawn out and pulled in all directions,” he said affectionately. “It’s kind of like modeling clay. They’re all descended from an ancestral beetle, and all the bits are there,” he added, “and yet they’re being stretched this way and kneaded that way and pushed that way and bent this way. Once you get it, evolution becomes so obvious.”
Why write a guide to evolution now, when there are already so many books on the topic, some of them by Mr. Dawkins?
For one thing, 2009 is the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth, and the 150th anniversary of his book “On the Origin of Species.” For another, “The Greatest Show on Earth” is Mr. Dawkins’s own “missing link,” he said, filling in the gaps in his previous works. While earlier books assumed that readers understood the scientific basis for evolution, this one lays it out directly.
Mr. Dawkins already deployed ample indignation against creationists and others of their ilk in “The God Delusion,” so he has less time for all that in his new book. But he does reserve a corner of his contempt for those he calls “history deniers,” who contend that evolution is a hoax and who are, he says, akin to Holocaust deniers.
...
-
"Evolution All Around" by Nicholas Waide, October 8, 2009 / The New York Times
Official Site of Richard Dawkins
Official channel of Richard Dawkins on YouTube.com
