The Greatest Show on Earth The Evidence for Evolution
Reviews
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This is a challenging book to assess. My first question, upon finishing it, is "who is this for?" The science is too involved for a scientifically illiterate fundamentalist creationist audience, the sardonic tone likewise off-putting to them, and the atheists like me who share his broad perspective hardly need a hand-held walk through the garden of nature's wonders and weirdnesses. Then again, maybe we do: it should be emphasised that this book makes for a fantastic full spectrum look at the subject of evolutionary theory, one complete with some excellent analogies, stunning facts, and wise correlations. Anyone with a high school level understanding of biology will be more than equipped to follow along and learn. Unfortunately, Dawkins' extensive expertise in the subject matter often falls prey to his fairly direct sense of humour, expressed via a mocking tone that does more to further the stereotype of him as a shrill British ponce than to reveal his truer nature as a passionate humanist. Inevitably, I am drawn to wonder what the inimitable Christopher Hitchens would have done with a similar task, equipped with Dawkins' subject expertise. I suspect his subtler wit, fantastically evocative writing, and sophisticated understanding of debate would have produced a finer work. Nevertheless, I would not hesitate to recommend The Greatest Show On Earth to anyone who seeks a peerless introduction to the current state of evolutionary theory, or to a thicker-skinned creationist seeking to inform themselves about the opposing side in the debate about the origins of life.
This is a challenging book to assess. My first question, upon finishing it, is "who is this for?" The science is too involved for a scientifically illiterate fundamentalist creationist audience, the sardonic tone likewise off-putting to them, and the atheists like me who share his broad perspective hardly need a hand-held walk through the garden of nature's wonders and weirdnesses. Then again, maybe we do: it should be emphasised that this book makes for a fantastic full spectrum look at the subject of evolutionary theory, one complete with some excellent analogies, stunning facts, and wise correlations. Anyone with a high school level understanding of biology will be more than equipped to follow along and learn. Unfortunately, Dawkins' extensive expertise in the subject matter often falls prey to his fairly direct sense of humour, expressed via a mocking tone that does more to further the stereotype of him as a shrill British ponce than to reveal his truer nature as a passionate humanist. Inevitably, I am drawn to wonder what the inimitable Christopher Hitchens would have done with a similar task, equipped with Dawkins' subject expertise. I suspect his subtler wit, fantastically evocative writing, and sophisticated understanding of debate would have produced a finer work. Nevertheless, I would not hesitate to recommend The Greatest Show On Earth to anyone who seeks a peerless introduction to the current state of evolutionary theory, or to a thicker-skinned creationist seeking to inform themselves about the opposing side in the debate about the origins of life.
Highlights
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).
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,
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
Economy of the species
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.
Population Thinking