Sign in with Facebook
David S. T.'s Reviews > The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution
The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution
by Richard Dawkins (Goodreads Author)
by Richard Dawkins (Goodreads Author)
David S. T.'s review
bookshelves: science, own, read-in-2011
May 04, 11
bookshelves: science, own, read-in-2011
Read from April 14 to 27, 2011
This isn't the best introductory book I've read on evolution, Dawkins loves to insult the people who don't hold his views, goes way to far sometimes to get his point across and has a tendency to ramble on and mention interesting but irrelevant stuff. Once you get past the flaws this actually is a pretty good book, oddly by the end some of those qualities I hated about the book in the beginning, I started to appreciate more in the end (I kind of enjoy the almost pointless side stories and facts).
When I started reading this book, I put it down for a while because I got tired of the creationist rants, which apparently the high number of people who deny evolution is why this book is written. Dawkins even goes as far as comparing an evolution denier as the equivalent of someone denying the existence of the roman civilization or even worse a holocaust denier. I'm sorry but lacking the understanding or denying evolution is nothing like denying the holocaust. For one thing we've never really witnessed one animal evolving into another completely different species, meaning one "kind" into another "kind", in our lifetime (which is far too short of a time scale) or even more a bacteria evolving into a mammal, this doesn't mean evolution is false (its not), but it is far different than denying the holocaust. Anyways eventually I picked the book back up and it was far better as I got further into it. Also expect to hear the word “history-deniers” every few pages, I guess he wants us to remember just how terrible the evolution deniers are. Since this book is written to convince the 40% of American who deny evolution, Dawkins should realize by now that insulting your target audience isn't the best way to get them to listen to you. If anything his books do more help to the young earth creationist movement and intelligent design.
The subtitle of this book is “The Evidence for Evolution”, which is kind of an unfitting title, I found that Coyne's Why Evolution is True contains far more evidence in far fewer pages and is overall a better introduction to evolution. You see Dawkins often goes off on rants which do not to move the evidence along. For example in a chapter he discusses the age of the earth, he spends several pages discussing getting the age from tree rings. You see you can match the width of tree rings with others and go back to earlier dates, but then he says that the chain of tree rings goes back 11,000 years only, well the pages he spent on this argument do nothing to convince a young earth creationist of the age of the earth, in fact the argument works in their favor. The book is full of these little side notes and stories which causes the page numbers to go up, but the relevant information doesn't follow. Also expect tons of foot notes with mostly rants about TV shows he wants to be on, his childhood, or why we should call the Beijing Man, the Peking fossil, ect.
I know I've complained some but don't get me wrong, this book, once you look past the flaws, is still very interesting and worth reading (assuming that you're not a creationist). Many of the side stories which I complained about are actually interesting if you don’t mind frequent diversions and he goes into DNA a little more than the other non DNA specific evolution books I've read. So in the end I do think its pretty good, just not as a first book on evolution.
When I started reading this book, I put it down for a while because I got tired of the creationist rants, which apparently the high number of people who deny evolution is why this book is written. Dawkins even goes as far as comparing an evolution denier as the equivalent of someone denying the existence of the roman civilization or even worse a holocaust denier. I'm sorry but lacking the understanding or denying evolution is nothing like denying the holocaust. For one thing we've never really witnessed one animal evolving into another completely different species, meaning one "kind" into another "kind", in our lifetime (which is far too short of a time scale) or even more a bacteria evolving into a mammal, this doesn't mean evolution is false (its not), but it is far different than denying the holocaust. Anyways eventually I picked the book back up and it was far better as I got further into it. Also expect to hear the word “history-deniers” every few pages, I guess he wants us to remember just how terrible the evolution deniers are. Since this book is written to convince the 40% of American who deny evolution, Dawkins should realize by now that insulting your target audience isn't the best way to get them to listen to you. If anything his books do more help to the young earth creationist movement and intelligent design.
The subtitle of this book is “The Evidence for Evolution”, which is kind of an unfitting title, I found that Coyne's Why Evolution is True contains far more evidence in far fewer pages and is overall a better introduction to evolution. You see Dawkins often goes off on rants which do not to move the evidence along. For example in a chapter he discusses the age of the earth, he spends several pages discussing getting the age from tree rings. You see you can match the width of tree rings with others and go back to earlier dates, but then he says that the chain of tree rings goes back 11,000 years only, well the pages he spent on this argument do nothing to convince a young earth creationist of the age of the earth, in fact the argument works in their favor. The book is full of these little side notes and stories which causes the page numbers to go up, but the relevant information doesn't follow. Also expect tons of foot notes with mostly rants about TV shows he wants to be on, his childhood, or why we should call the Beijing Man, the Peking fossil, ect.
I know I've complained some but don't get me wrong, this book, once you look past the flaws, is still very interesting and worth reading (assuming that you're not a creationist). Many of the side stories which I complained about are actually interesting if you don’t mind frequent diversions and he goes into DNA a little more than the other non DNA specific evolution books I've read. So in the end I do think its pretty good, just not as a first book on evolution.
Sign into Goodreads to see if any of your friends have read The Greatest Show on Earth.
sign in »
Reading Progress
| 04/17/2011 | page 190 |
|
40.0% |
Comments (showing 1-6 of 6) (6 new)
date
newest »
newest »
Sorry that sentence is a little confusing, I should correct it. I meant something which a creationist would accept. Not stuff like microbial adaptations or variations. I meant one "kind" changing into another "kind". For example a dinosaur becoming a bird, or a land creature similar to a hippo becoming a whale.
As for Darwin, expect example after example of his experiments to prove evolution is true. (For example all of the seeds he placed in salt water to see if they still germinated after x number of days). Its still pretty interesting, but at the same time it can get very boring.
yes, but do you see why large changes like that are rare/almost impossible nowadays?take the example of a fish changing into an land animal.
the first fish to be able to make it onto land would probably look nothing like a mammal. it would probably look like a very awkward fish, that was able to somehow breathe air and flap onto land without dying. but as a land animal, it was probably defenseless in that it couldn't run very fast or climb trees or anything.
if there weren't any land animals already in existence, then it might live. It has no competition on land, plus nobody can eat it because nobody else lives on land.
now consider if this were to happen today. if a catfish suddenly went onto land, the first land animal whether it be a dog or a bear or whatever will eat it. It's all about competition. So the lineage stops there.
it's about finding niches where there is currently no competition, and if all the niches are filled up (like it probably is right now, after billions of years of niche filling) then it's pretty rare to find cases of radical speciation.
the only way this kind of radical change can happen is if 1. the physical environment changes drastically, so that certain new niches open up 2. a catastrophe where lots of existing species die off, giving room for others to fill in
and still you need billions of years
these are all just my opinions, I don't think I've actually read this exact explanation before, but I think it makes sense to me, given what we know about evolution.
I generally agree though I don't see anything wrong with belittling flat earthers; creationist, and holocaust, climate change, or germ theory deniers, all of which are more or less in the same category of "dangerously ignorant and stupid."You're criticism of his diversions, belaboring of the point, and generally not making as strong a case as he could have, are all misplaced I feel. This book isn't supposed to be a book you give to Creationists to bring them around. Its written for people already on board with evolution. That book would be far less interesting, this is more about how mind blowing the subtle complexities of evolutionary biology are.
I guess the impression I got is that this book was written because Dawkins had never written about why evolution was true and because so many people are still YEC (young earth creationists), which lead me to believe this was written to prove that evolution was true to the people who are YEC, not to people who already accept it (which would seem to be redundant).As for insulting and belittling people who lack an understanding about things such as evolution and calling them "dangerously ignorant and stupid." doesn't surprise me, it seems thats a pretty common response from some of the people who read dawkins.
(Although I do understand some harshness to people who purposely lie to better help their case, which isn't at all your average YEC).
Actually, we have observed many instances of speciation (which is what you're talking about) in our lifetimes. See section 5.0 "Observed Instances of Speciation" in this document for examples:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-s...
You are, however, correct in that we have not seen a bacteria evolving into a mammal. I actually don't think that can happen anymore (unless there is some kind of world wide catastrophe that massively changes the biosphere), because as soon as a bacteria evolves into a slightly higher life form, it will probably not survive against other higher life forms that have already been there and have adapted all the best tools for surviving as a higher life form...
The only reason a life form will survive after any kind of genetic change is if it provides a benefit to their continued reproduction. If the world is already full of species of higher forms, there is no advantage for a simple life form to step up to a higher life form... whereas if the world were empty except for bacteria (like it was probably in the beginning) then if one bacteria evolved into a more complex form, it would immediately have the advantage over the others since there would be no other competition on that level. I'm not sure if I'm making this any clearer.
Nice to see you reading this as well as Darwin! I haven't even tackled that yet.