Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins transformed our view of God in his blockbuster, The God Delusion, which sold more than 2 million copies in English alone. He revolutionized the way we see natural selection in the seminal bestseller The Selfish Gene. Now, he launches a fierce counterattack against proponents of "Intelligent Design" in his New York Times bestseller, The Greatest Show on Earth. "Intelligent Design" is being taught in our schools; educators are being asked to "teach the controversy" behind evolutionary theory. There is no controversy. Dawkins sifts through rich layers of scientific evidence—from living examples of natural selection to clues in the fossil record; from natural clocks that mark the vast epochs wherein evolution ran its course to the intricacies of developing embryos; from plate tectonics to molecular genetics—to make the airtight case that "we find ourselves perched on one tiny twig in the midst of a blossoming and flourishing tree of life and it is no accident, but the direct consequence of evolution by non-random selection." His unjaded passion for the natural world turns what might have been a negative argument, exposing the absurdities of the creationist position, into a positive offering to the reader: nothing less than a master’s vision of life, in all its splendor.

The Evidence for Evolution

The Greatest Show on Earth

Sagar Rathna Sabapathy

All is fluid, as another Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, said; nothing fixed. After a hundred million years it may be hard to believe that the descendant animals ever had rabbits for ancestors. Yet in no generation during the evolutionary process was the predominant type in the population far from the modal type in the previous generation or the following generation. This way of thinking is what Mayr called population thinking. Population thinking, for him, the antithesis of essentialism. According to Mayr, the reason Darwin was such an unconscionable time arriving on the scene was that we all - whether because of Greek influence or for some other reason -have essentialism burned into our mental DNA.

Plants have an energy economy and, as with any economny, trade-offs may favour different options under different circumstances. That's an important lesson in evolution, by the way. Different species do things in different ways, and we often won't understand the differences until we have examined the whole economy of the species 

 Insects have good colour vision, but their whole spectrum is shifted towards the ultraviolet and away from the red. Like us, they see yellow, green, blue and violet. Unlike us, however, they also see well into the ultraviolet range; and they don't see red, at 'our' end of the spectrum. If you have a red tubular flower in your garden it is a good bet, though not a certain prediction, that in the wild it is pollinated not by insects but by birds, who see well at the red end of the spectrum - perhaps hummingbirds if it is a New World plant, or sunbirds if an Old World plant. Flowers that look plain to us may actually be lavishly decorated with spots or stripes for the benefit of insects, ornamentation that we can't see because we are blind to ultraviolet. Many flowers guide bees in to land by little runway markings, painted on the flower in ultraviolet pigments, which the human eye can't see,

The relationship between insects and flowers is a two-way street, and we mustn't neglect to look in both directions. Insects may 'breed' flowers to be more beautiful, but not because they enjoy the beauty. Rather, the flowers benefit from being perceived as attractive by insects. The insects, by choosing the most attractive flowers to visit, inadvertently breed for floral beauty. At the same time, the flowers are breeding the insects for pollination ability. Then again, I have implied that insects breed flowers for high nectar yield, like dairymen breeding massively uddered Friesians. But it is in the flowers' interests to ration their nectar. Satiate an insect and it has no incentive to go on and look for a second flower - bad news for the first flower, for which the second visit, the pollinating visit, is the whole point of the exercise. From the flowers' point of view, a delicate balance must be struck between providing too much nectar (no Visit to a second flower) and too little (no incentive to visit the first flower). 

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