By JOHN HORGAN - THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
Added: Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:00:00 UTC

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/entertainment/books/20091108_Heaps_of_evolution_evidence.html

If I believed in God, I would thank him for blessing us with Richard Dawkins. The British biologist has become renowned lately for denouncing religion, most recently in his 2006 best seller The God Delusion. But I prefer his explanations and celebrations of "eating, growing, rotting, swimming, walking, flying, burrowing, stalking, chasing, fleeing, outpacing, outwitting" creatures, as he describes them in The Greatest Show on Earth.

Dawkins calls this work his "missing link." His previous nine books offered reinterpretations of evolutionary theory (The Selfish Gene, The Extended Phenotype) and addressed challenges to it (The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable). But he never presented the basic evidence for evolution and its prime mover, natural selection. Greatest Show fills that gap in a timely fashion, coming 200 years after Darwin's birth and 150 years after the publication of On the Origin of Species.

Justifying the book, Dawkins deplores the stubborn rejection of evolution by as many as 40 percent of Americans and, he claims, growing numbers of Europeans. He realizes that these nonbelievers, whom he equates with Holocaust deniers, are unlikely to read anything he writes. He hopes that Greatest Show will be absorbed, rather, by those who know evolution deniers, "perhaps members of their own family and church," and want to be "prepared to argue the case."
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TAGGED: BOOKS, REVIEWS, RICHARD DAWKINS