review: the greatest show on earth
If it was Richard Dawkins’ goal to persuade the readers of his new book to believe in evolution, his effort was not successful with me. I’ve never believed in evolution. Not once. Instead, I read the available literature and came to the conclusion that it’s the best possible explanation for how life on this planet came to be the way it is. And while this point might seem like nitpicking or semantics, it’s actually the best way to explain how all the ways Dawkins excels at explaining evolution and the evidence for it, make The Greatest Show on Earth much more of a preaching to the choir rather than a definitive arsenal of explanations that dismantle creationism. It’s kind of like watching a well crafted video about evolution hosted by a presenter at ease with the subject.
To say that the book is written for a friendly audience would be wrong since nearly a hundred pages are spent on explanations of artificial, natural and sexual selections, mutations and how fossils are dated, presented as an introduction to the concept that life can change and diversify on its own and that’s exactly what it does. But all the painstaking detail will probably be just a refresher course of those of us who paid attention in freshman biology. While we get an interesting lecture about the Platonic worldview which may have stalled our ability to consider evolution’s basic mechanics to be a plausible concept, things really start to pick up with an excellent summary of bacterial studies conducted by Dr. Richard Lenski and his team.
In this and several subsequent chapters, Dawkins demolishes creationist claims with the thoroughness and level of detail that clearly convey his passion for the science and expose the pseudoscientific ridicule for what it is; empty rhetoric that comes from denial and ignorance of the subject. However, in Chapter 7, he provides what should be a disturbing transcript of his chat with Wendy Wright, the president of the fundamentalist think tank founded to advance backwards, quasi-theocratic agendas. During the conversation, Wright just talks over Dawkins every time he mentions fossil collections in museums and desperately chants that there’s no proof for evolution, no transitional fossils and insisting that the only reason why creationism isn’t being promoted in schools or museums is because there’s an evil conspiracy to silence creationists.
Let’s think about that for a second. I could run out into the streets and declare that the sky is purple. When I’m told that the sky is in fact blue due to the diffusion of light in the atmosphere and all I have to do is look up, my reaction is to talk over those who try to correct me and say that the only reason they say it is because they hate the sense of morality I get from a purple sky and there’s a long running conspiracy to silence those of us who believe in purple skies. If they press me really hard, I’ll tell them that blue skies lead to immorality, debauchery and horrible crimes and I will not surrender my firm certainty in the sky’s purple tint because I don’t want to be tortured in Hell for my amoral ways. How do you reason which this kind of logical lapse? How do you calm the hysterical fear and denial without having to take a direct stab at my beliefs? Because this is what Dawkins is up against here and by purposefully avoiding the topic of faith, he ties his hands.
Once upon a time I used to wag my finger at PZ Myers and his forceful attacks on ardent theists and their faith, saying that rather than play into the cliché of an atheist polemicist with a PhD he should simply let the facts do the talking. Not anymore. After a year of bombardment by indignant denials from creationists who not only lack the necessary education, they ardently refuse to acquire it, irritation begins to set in. You get tired of repeating the same things over and over again, backed by reams of evidence, just to have it all spat back in your face by someone who looks down on you as a deluded fool at best, and an amoral lowlife at worst. Try as he might to explain the mechanisms of evolution, even a gifted writer with a slew of scientific credentials like Dawkins is simply not going to pierce the creationists’ mental carapace. They won’t even change the arguments he swiftly and definitively demolishes. They’ll simply stuck their fingers in their ears, hum until he stops talking and keep throwing them out again and again.
In this regard, The Greatest Show on Earth is a nifty review of evolution and it will sell briskly since Dawkins is Dawkins and he has a wealth of knowledge to share with those of us interested in biology. But will it change the status quo and make a significant crack in the dam erected by creationists to block the flow of science into their world? Sadly, I find that very, very doubtful.
