The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution By Richard Dawkins
Telegraph, September 1, 2009.
On June 22, 2000, the Human Genome Project published a list of the three billion pairs of nucleotides that make up the human genetic code. The project – an international, government-funded endeavour – cost around $3 billion, and was expected to take 15 years. By the time the results were published, two years ahead of schedule, the cost of gene sequencing had plummeted. By the time my own children are buying books like Richard Dawkins’ The Greatest Show on Earth, sequencing genomes will cost less than a thousand dollars per species.Then, says Dawkins,‘detailed DNA comparisons will fill in all the gaps in our knowledge about the actual evolutionary relatedness of every species to every other: we shall know, with complete certainty, the entire family tree of all living creatures.’
Evolution by natural selection is a theory in the sense that Newton’s laws of motion are theories.They are not hypotheses.They are descriptions (more or less well-phrased, and – in theory – always capable of improvement) of the real world.The weight of evidence for evolution is, and always has been, staggering. Dawkins gathers it up into a huge lump, calls it The Greatest Show on Earth and hurls it at the reader’s head from the highest heights his rhetoric can scale. He writes about the clocks (biological, nuclear and geological) by which the history of life on earth may be known.
He rightly reminds us that the fossil record is a relatively superfluous element of evolution’s evidential armoury, and he gleefully demolishes the more familiar creationist objections. Dawkins is to the modern evolutionary synthesis what Metallica’s Lars Ulrich is to heavy metal: a curmudgeon whose talent and passion have made him an unlikely poster boy. Fans will close Dawkins’ book as metalheads stagger out of Ulrich’s gigs, grinning from ear to bleeding ear, while those of moderate tastes will tut impotently: why do they have to play so loud?
Dawkins takes evolution’s classic anecdotes, reveals the evidence underpinning them, and demonstrates their power to explain, not just one or two curious phenomena, but the whole warp and woof of nature. Consider, for example, the tree. Any right-thinking tree should conserve its energy and hug the ground. It only takes one tree to grow a stalk, however, and suddenly every tree must grow as tall as possible to capture more light than its neighbour. Among the trees wander elk, whose sexually impressive antlers are too big and heavy for their heads.The elk, in turn, are hunted by wolves, whose speed, grace and intelligence have all evolved – at swingeing cost – to deal with the elk’s habit of running away. All of nature is an arms race, and every arms race is futile.
Dawkins is a master of scientific clarity and wit, but he grows ever more garrulous.Anger (at creationists, religious apologists and, as it seems, any passing twit) saps his creative imagination, and when this happens he sounds both metallic and hollow, as though he were lecturing from inside an old Huntley and Palmers biscuit tin. But there is magic here, too, in passages that recall early masterpieces like Climbing Mount Improbable. Watching the dissection of a giraffe’s recurrent laryngeal nerve (the one that infamously runs from one part of the giraffe’s head to another via the heart) we’re given a visceral sense of the disarray that prevails wherever living systems are exposed to virtually no selection pressure: ‘the overwhelming impression you get from surveying any part of the innards of a large animal is that it is a mess... a decent designer would never have perpetrated anything of the shambles that is the criss-crossing maze of arteries, veins, nerves, intestines, wads of fat and muscle, mesenteries and more.’
This is good, but familiar. Dawkins claims he must keep repeating himself; that the blandishments of the Intelligent Design lobby force him into the position of ‘a teacher of Latin forced to waste his time and energy defending the proposition that the Romans and their language ever existed’. This is a very big alibi for a straightforward retelling of familiar material. More likely, rehearsing evolution’s basics may be one of the very few things Dawkins still has left to do.
Now in his 67th year, Dawkins is long overdue for his philosopause – that period in a scientist’s life when philosophical explorations seem so much easier and more enticing to write about than the rigours of the lab and the field. Dawkins’ career, however, is weirdly back- to-front: his philosopause is long behind him. Dawkins’ notion that cultural information evolves through natural selection was first propounded in The Selfish Gene, published in 1976. Dawkins theory of ‘memes’ is a classical piece of philosopausal thinking: it rings true – it may even be true – but, more than 30 years on, it shows absolutely no sign whatsoever of birthing any real science. Dawkins’ atheism keeps the meme alive, powering his idea of religion as mass delusion. Dawkins the science writer, however, steers clear of memes, preferring to riff more and more stridently on the fundamentals of real biology.
‘History,’Dawkins says,‘is written all over the body, not just once, but repeatedly, in exuberant palimpsest.’ The same may be said of Dawkins’ work. It too has its notorious detours and vestigial polyps. The Greatest Show on Earth is a minor addition to Dawkins’ body of work. But there is still grandeur in his view of life, and timeless merit in any good tune turned up, Spinal Tap-style, to 11.
