2021年10月26日 星期二

"The Greatest Show on Earth" by Richard Dawkins (2009)


"Once again, I am sorry to take a sledgehammer to so small and fragile a nut, but I have to do so because more than 40 percent of the American people believe literally in the story of Noah's Ark.  We should be able to ignore them and get on with our science, but we can't afford to because they control school boards, they home-school their children to deprive them of access to proper science teachers, and they include many members of the United States Congress, some state governors and even presidential and vice-presidential candidates.  They have the money and the power to build institutions, universities, even a museum where children ride life-size mechanical models of dinosaurs, which, they are solemnly told, coexisted with humans.  And, as recent polls have shown, Britain is not far behind (or should that read 'ahead'?), along with parts of Europe and most of the Islamic world."

Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, author and noted atheist.  His 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which has also been reviewed here, propelled him to fame, and he's remained in the public eye ever since.

If you've read The Selfish Gene, or any of Dawkins' other books, you'll find much that's familiar in The Greatest Show on Earth.  In this work he champions Darwin's theory of evolution, his copy of On the Origin of the Species firmly in hand.  Creationism, he argues, is a threat to both our understanding of the world and the very underpinnings of modern society.  In thirteen chapters he rails against this threat, bringing to bear discoveries from biology, geology and chemistry.

It's a good book if you're looking for an overview of our present scientific understanding of the world, but I'm not exactly sure who it was written for.  Those who've followed Dawkins from previous works won't find much on offer in The Greatest Show on Earth, and those adhering to creationist accounts of life's origins will only be further alienated by it.  To compound this problem it really is condescending at times, and those coming to this book with a more open mind might find it off-putting for that reason.

For the record I agree with everything Dawkins states in this book.  But then again I already knew that I would agree with him.  So why did I read it?  Who was it for?  And why was it written?

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