Richard Dawkings talks with Roger Bingham about his book, The Greatest Show On Earth: The Evidence For Evolution.
Richard Dawkins has written a number of books about evolution, beginning with his first two titles The Selfish Gene (1976) and The Extended Phenotype (1982). His recent documentary series The Genius of Charles Darwin looks at Darwin’s life and some of the evidence for evolution. Despite these works and others, he felt that there was a “missing link” in that he had never comprehensively addressed the evidence of common descent. Dawkins believed that opposition to evolution at the time of writing the book was as strong as ever, despite overwhelming and still growing evidence for the theory.
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
