By DAVID PERLMAN - SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
Added: Sun, 01 Nov 2009 00:00:00 UTC

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/10/30/RVO31A8NU9.DTL&type=science

Richard Dawkins, who recently retired from the Oxford University faculty, is a canny, funny and beguiling biologist.

Like a detective reconstructing a crime, he gives us dozens upon dozens of clues from the fossil record and from today's genetics laboratories to persuade us all that evolution is indeed real and that the process has in fact made us all relatives, however distant, of everything else alive.

This lavishly illustrated and detailed tribute to Charles Darwin, however well written, will probably not convince creationists nor convert believers in intelligent design. Those folks, he maintains, are "history deniers," and beyond redemption.

This is Dawkins' 10th book and arguably his best since "The Selfish Gene" and "The Blind Watchmaker." Most recently he vented his anger with a splenetic defense of atheism in "The God Delusion," but now he has largely avoided rancor and has laid out the most striking evidence with such fascinating detail that the book is both scientifically exciting and completely convincing.

Nor is the professor unaware that some religious readers who accept the evidence may still have doubts, and Dawkins restrains his militant atheism long enough to cite both the archbishop of Canterbury and the pope as among evolution's backers.
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http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/10/30/RVO31A8NU9.DTL&type=science

TAGGED: BOOKS, REVIEWS, RICHARD DAWKINS