NONFICTION
(SCIENCE)
The Greatest Show on Earth: The
Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins (Free Press, 2009, paperback
$16.99)
Reviewed by Laird
Addis, Jr.
The Greatest Show on
Earth by Richard Dawkins, subtitled The
Evidence for Evolution, is a wonderfully entertaining
description of the multiple kinds of facts that make up the basis for the
evolutionary account of life on earth. I
never tire of reading Dawkins’s books, for he is the best writer around on evolution
for the non-specialist. He uses examples
and pictures in a convincing way as he tells his story of how many kinds of
evidence—from DNA studies to carbon
dating to the fossil record to embryology (“How could complicated organisms
like humans have come from single-cell organisms? You did it yourself in only nine months.”) to direct observations of evolution in
laboratories and nature, and much more—all come together to ground the only
plausible account of how life developed from its origin more than three billion
years ago. Like Darwin, Dawkins does not
try to explain the origin itself, but only how life evolved once it did
exist. There are hundreds of books on
evolution, and I have read many of them, but this is possibly the best single
book one could find for anyone wanting to understand how scientists know of the
fact of evolution.
