Richard Dawkins – The Greatest Show on Earth.

Dawkins lays out evidence that evolution is true. Science is full of tested assumptions, and just as physicists must assume the truth of gravity before moving on to quantum mechanics, so do biologists depend on the reality of evolution. Dawkins states that a large proportion of the public in the west do not share his enthusiasm for evolution, since it seemed to contradict the Bible and diminish the role of God. So this is his take for history-deniers. He repeatedly compares creationists and Holocaust deniers, which is a peculiar way of reaching out to the other side. Elsewhere, Dawkins calls those who don’t subscribe to evolution ignorant, fatuously ignorant and ridiculous. Is Dawkins preaching to the choir or trying to convert the uninformed? While The Greatest Show on Earth might fail as a work of persuasive rhetoric— It succeeds as an encyclopedic summary of evolutionary biology. If Charles Darwin walked into a 21st-century bookstore and wanted to know how his theory had fared, this is the book he should pick up. Dawkins remains a superb translator of complex scientific concepts. Dawkins has a way of making the drollest details feel like a revelation. Even if one already believes in the survival of the fittest, there is something thrilling about learning that the hoof of a horse is homologous to the fingernail of the human middle finger, or that some dinosaurs had a second brain of ganglion cells in their pelvis, which helped compensate for the tiny brain in their head. As Darwin famously noted, There is grandeur in this view of life. Dawkins demonstrates is that this view of life isn’t just grand: it’s also undeniably true.