By UYGAR POLAT - NO DRY LIGHT
Added: Thu, 21 Jan 2010 00:00:00 UTC

http://nodrylight.wordpress.com/2010/01/20/review-the-greatest-show-on-earth/
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This review of TGSOE was written by Uygar Polat, who is one of the team of people translating the book into Turkish, which is his first language. He has previously edited the Turkish edition of A Devil’s Chaplain and is one of the designated Turkish translators of Climbing Mount Improbable and Unweaving the Rainbow. Uygar is also a member of a Turkish group called Evrim Caliskanlari (Hardworkers for Evolution - http://www.evrimianlamak.org/e/Ana_Sayfa ), which tries to promote the public understanding of evolution, mainly by translating UC Berkeley's Understanding Evolution site.
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The review of The Greatest Show on Earth, The Evidence For Evolution by Richard Dawkins. This was submitted as a take-home assignment for a philosophy course entitled “Darwin & Philosophy.” It got a 9 out of 10, with the following criticism from the instructor (paraphrased): “You could have inquired further into the philosophical aspects of Dawkins’ ideas and supplemented them with your own.” Citations omitted, some corrections made.

“If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had, I’d give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law” says American philosopher Daniel Dennett, who is also a good friend of Richard Dawkins. Since it was first published in November 1859, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution has passed every scientific test it has encountered with flying colors. It has proven to possess immense explanatory power in biology, so much so that Theodosius Dobzhansky, one of the founding fathers of modern evolutionary synthesis, have aptly proclaimed that “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” Indeed, without the hindsight of evolution, facts of life were merely collected data, unexplained and unconnected. With the hindsight of evolution all those facts could be understood and explained by a robust mechanism. (This demarcation is reminiscent of the difference of Einstein’s theory of gravity with that of Newton’s. In Newton’s theory, nobody knew how gravity affected things; it just did. In Einstein’s theory, however, a field permeated otherwise empty spacetime that was bent in the presence of energy and that’s how bodies were affected by gravity. In other words Einstein explained gravity where Newton only described it. Likewise, the fact of life is explained with the arrival of Charles Darwin). That robust mechanism, namely natural selection, not only provided a general framework in which scientists could understand hitherto puzzling adaptations and diversity, it is also one of the simplest of all scientific ideas: the organisms with what it takes to reproduce and flourish, outreproduces and outflourishes those who do not. Simple as it may be, Darwin’s idea of natural selection is, as Dennett continues with his quote, “not just a wonderful scientific idea. It is a dangerous idea.” That seems like a fair observation, given the never ending controversy since 1859. But just what is it that makes evolution by natural selection such a dangerous idea?
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TAGGED: BOOKS, REVIEWS, RICHARD DAWKINS