Richard Dawkins is the author of The Selfish Gene, The Ancestor’s Tale and The God Delusion. His latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth, will be published by Free Press on Tuesday. This article by Dr Dawkins is from the Wall Street Journal.

Before 1859 it would have seemed natural to agree with William Paley, in Natural Theology, that the creation of life was God’s greatest work. Especially (vanity might add) human life.
Today we’d amend the statement: Evolution is the universe’s greatest work. Evolution is the creator of life, and life is arguably the most surprising and most beautiful production that the laws of physics have generated.
Evolution, to quote a T-shirt sent me by an anonymous well-wisher, is the greatest show on earth, the only game in town.
Indeed, evolution is probably the greatest show in the entire universe. Most scientists’ hunch is that there are independently evolved life forms dotted around planetary islands throughout the universe, though sadly too thinly scattered to encounter one another.
And if there is life elsewhere, it is something stronger than a hunch to say that it will turnout to be Darwinian life.
The argument in favour of alien life existing at all is weaker than the argument that if it exists at all, it will be Darwinian life.
But it is also possible that we really are alone in the universe, in which case Earth, with its greatest show, is the most remarkable planet in the universe.
- What is so special about life?
It never violates the laws of physics. Nothing does (if anything did, physicists would just have to formulate new laws; it’s happened often enough in the history of science).
But although life never violates the laws of physics, it pushes them into unexpected avenues that stagger the imagination. If we didn’t know about life we wouldn’t believe it was possible; except, of course, that there’d then be nobody around to do the disbelieving.
The laws of physics, before Darwinian evolution bursts out from their midst, can make rocks and sand, gas clouds and stars, whirlpools and waves, whirlpool-shaped galaxies and light that travels as waves while behaving like particles. It is an interesting, fascinating and, in many ways, deeply mysterious universe.
But now, enter life. Look, through the eyes of a physicist, at a bounding kangaroo, a swooping bat, a leaping dolphin, a soaring coast redwood. There never was a rock that bounded like a kangaroo, never a pebble that crawled like a beetle seeking a mate, never a sand grain that swam like a water flea.
Not once do any of these creatures disobey one jot or tittle of the laws of physics.
Far from violating the laws of thermo-dynamics (as is often ignorantly alleged), they are relentlessly driven by them.
Far from violating the laws of motion, animals exploit them to their advantage as they walk, run, dodge and jink, leap and fly, pounce on prey or spring to safety.
Never once are the laws of physics violated, yet life emerges into uncharted territory.
- And how is the trick done?
The answer is a process that, although variable in its wondrous detail, is sufficiently uniform to deserve one single name: Darwinian evolution, the non-random survival of randomly varying coded information.
We know, as certainly as we know anything in science, that this is the process that has generated life on our planet. And my bet, as I said, is that the same process is in operation wherever life may be found, anywhere in the universe.
- What if the greatest show on earth is not the greatest show in the universe?
- What if there are life forms on other planets that have evolved so far beyond our level of intelligence and creativity that we should regard them as gods, were we ever so fortunate (or unfortunate?) as to meet them? Would they indeed be gods?
- Wouldn’t we be tempted to fall on our knees and worship them, as a medieval peasant might if suddenly confronted with such miracles as a Boeing 747, a mobile telephone or Google Earth?
But, however god-like the aliens might seem, they would not be gods, and for one very important reason.
They did not create the universe; it created them, just as it created us.
Making the universe is the one thing no intelligence, however super-human, could do, because an intelligence is complex — statistically improbable — and therefore had to emerge, by gradual degrees, from simpler beginnings: from a lifeless universe, the miracle-free zone that is physics.
To midwife such emergence is the singular achievement of Darwinian evolution.
It starts with primeval simplicity and fosters, by slow, explicable degrees, the emergence of complexity: seemingly limitless complexity, certainly up to our human level of complexity and very probably way beyond.
There may be worlds on which superhuman life thrives, superhuman to a level that our imaginations cannot grasp.
But superhuman does not mean supernatural. Darwinian evolution is the only process we know that is ultimately capable of generating anything as complicated as creative intelligences.
Once it has done so, of course, those intelligences can create other complex things: works of art and music, advanced technology, computers, the internet and who knows what in the future.
Darwinian evolution may not be the only such generative process in the universe. There may be other cranes (American philosopher Daniel Dennett’s term, which he opposes to skyhooks) that we have not yet discovered or imagined.
But, however wonderful and however different from Darwinian evolution those putative cranes may be, they cannot be magic.
They will share with Darwinian evolution the facility to raise up complexity, as an emergent property, out of simplicity, while never violating natural law.
- Where does that leave God?
The kindest thing to say is that it leaves him with nothing to do, and no achievements that might attract our praise, our worship or our fear.
Evolution is God’s redundancy notice, his pink slip.
But we have to go further. A complex creative intelligence with nothing to do is not just redundant.
A divine designer is all but ruled out by the consideration that he must at least be as complex as the entities he was wheeled out to explain.
God is not dead. He was never alive in the first place.
Now, there is a certain class of sophisticated modern theologian who will say something like this: “Good heavens, of course we are not so naive or simplistic as to care whether God exists.
Existence is such a 19th-century preoccupation!
It doesn’t matter whether God exists in a scientific sense. What matters is whether he exists for you or for me.
- “If God is real for you, who cares whether science has made him redundant?
Such arrogance!
Such elitism.”
Well, if that’s what floats your canoe, you’ll be paddling it up a very lonely creek.
The mainstream belief of the world’s peoples is very clear.
They believe in God, and that means they believe he exists in objective reality, just as surely as the Rock of Gibraltar exists.
If sophisticated theologians or post-modern relativists think they are rescuing God from the redundancy scrap heap by downplaying the importance of existence, they should think again.
Tell the congregation of a church or mosque that existence is too vulgar an attribute to fasten on to their God, and they will brand you an atheist.
They’ll be right.

From Publishers Weekly
SignatureReviewed by Jonah LehrerRichard Dawkins begins The Greatest Show on Earth with a short history of his writing career. He explains that all of his previous books have naïvely assumed the fact of evolution, which meant that he never got around to laying out the evidence that it [evolution] is true. This shouldn't be too surprising: science is an edifice 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. It's the theory that makes every other theory possible.Yet Dawkins also came to realize that a disturbingly large percentage of the American and British public didn't share his enthusiasm for evolution. In fact, they actively abhorred the idea, since it seemed to contradict the Bible and diminish the role of God. So Dawkins decided to write a book for these history-deniers, in which he would dispassionately demonstrate the truth of evolution beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt.After only a few pages of The Greatest Show on Earth, however, it becomes clear that Dawkins doesn't do dispassionate, and that he's not particularly interested in convincing believers to believe in evolution. 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. All of which raises the point: who, exactly, is supposed to read this book? 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—Dawkins is too angry and acerbic to convince his opponents—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. It doesn't matter if he's spinning metaphors for the fossil record (like a spy camera in a murder trial) or deftly explaining the method by which scientists measure the genetic difference between distinct species: he 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. What Dawkins demonstrates is that this view of life isn't just grand: it's also undeniably true. Color illus. (Sept. 29)Jonah Lehrer is the author of How We Decide and Proust Was a Neuroscientist.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

I am a critic of Dawkins. I wrote a response to The God Delusion ("The Truth Behind the New Atheism"), the essence of which could be summarized by paraphrasing a comment Dawkins makes in this book:

"It would be nice if those who oppose evolution (Christianity) would take a tiny bit of trouble to learn the merest rudiments of what it is that they are opposing."

Nevertheless, when I saw this book on the "best-seller" rack in the same store in Dawkins' home town where I bought GD, I thought I'd give him a second chance.

I'm glad I did; this is a much better book. It's well-written, as always. It has awesome photos and lots of humor. Clearly Dawkins is much more in his element talking about life forms than theology, the history of religion, or American culture. Sometimes Dawkins gets carried away with whimsy, sarcasm, or on tangents -- but those are often entertaining, too.

More importantly, Dawkins makes a case for evolution, in a limitted sense, that I think is fairly persuasive. What he establishes is evolution in the sense of, "common descent, over billions of years, from relatively simple life to the myriad creatures." On that, I think his argument should be persuasive to anyone open to being persuaded.

But why does an Oxford zoologist insist on "debating" only the most ignorant opponents? Why does he give us a more than four page transcript of his conversation with a representative from Concerned Women for America, whom he tears to pieces to his evident satisfaction, and never mention any proponent of Intelligent Design?

I was hoping he would. I wanted to read Dawkins' best argument against the most convincing arguments the other side could put up, for the curious reason that I really would like to know if there's anything to ID.

Instead, I found a strange but yawning "gap" in Dawkins' argument.

Dawkins knows who Michael Behe is. He wrote a review of his last book, The Edge of Evolution, for the New York Times. He never mentions him overtly in this book, but he does refer to him, at least twice. On page 128, Dawkins refers to "the 'irreducible complexity' of creationist propaganda." Then again on 132, he writes how "creationists" revile a certain set of experiments, because they show the power of natural selection "undermines their central dogma of irreducible complexity." As Dawkins well knows, "Irreducible complexity" is the signal idea in Behe's popular Darwin's Black Box, probably the most widely-cited book in the ID arsenal.

These references occur in an interesting context here. You find them in a chapter called "Before Our Own Eyes," about the fact that on occasion, evolution occurs so rapidly that it can be witnessed. More specifically, Dawkins offers these jibes towards the beginning of a seventeen-page long discussion of Richard Lenski's experiments with e-coli.

Dawkins discussion of these experiments is more than a little flabbergasting, giving his claim to have read Edge of Evolution. Behe discussed those experiments in that book, in quite a bit of detail as I recall. Behe also discussed the mutations Dawkins refers to here in a blog about a year ago. Dawkins mentions none of that. He says nothing about the probility of particular mutations compared to population size. He doesn't even deal with the physiological detail Behe gave. Reading this, it is hard to believe that he even read chapter 7 of Behe's book, still less his blog on how one "tribe" of e-coli found a way to metabolize citrate. He imagines that these experimental results are a great blow to Behe's concept of IC, completely overlooking the fact that these results are just what Behe predicted! A single instance of a probably double mutation in e coli after trillions of cell divisions, is closely in line with Behe's predictions. Surely someone as literate as Dawkins ought to be able to see this. Behe wrote in his blog a year ago:

"In The Edge of Evolution I had argued that the extreme rarity of the development of chloroquine resistance in malaria was likely the result of the need for several mutations to occur before the trait appeared. Even though the evolutionary literature contains discussions of multiple mutations, Darwinian reviewers drew back in horror, acted as if I had blasphemed, and argued desperately that a series of single beneficial mutations certainly could do the trick. Now here we have Richard Lenski affirming that the evolution of some pretty simple cellular features likely requires multiple mutations."

So Behe knows very well that duel mutations can aid in evolution on occasion. How bizarre for Dawkins to treat the same thing here as the death knell of IC!

Dawkins also claims that in Lenski's experiment:

"It all happened in a tiny faction of the time evolution normally takes."

Nonsense. 20,000 generations is the equivalent of 400,000 years for human beings. A trillion individuals would be equal to perhaps 20 million years of human evolution.

Dawkins then talks about how bacteria develop resistance to drugs -- the main subject of Behe's book, but he takes no notice whatsoever of any of the tough details Behe discusses. All we get are glib words of comfort for anyone who might doubt the power of evolution, and an attack on "goons and fools" at some conservative web site led by a lawyer. Dawkins seems to refuse to engage in any but the most childish contrary arguments -- a remarkable act of self-discipline for a scholar.

I'm finding it hard to "place" this guy. There's no doubt he knows a lot about the natural world, and is in love with its wonders. No one can deny that he is a brilliant and evocative writer, that his similes are often moving and suggestive, and that many eminent scientists swear by him. Nor would I deny this book is worth reading.

But Richard Dawkins seems to me less a scholar, and even rhetorical pugalist, than that sort of mythologist, like Freud, Nietzche, or Marx, who cloaks his beliefs in the language but not always the rigor of scientific argument. To the extent he argues, he only seems inclined, to take on the easiest possible targets; indeed one gets the feeling both here and in GD that he is talking down to his readers.

Nonetheless, it's not a bad book. Read it for the beautiful descriptions of the natural world, and for its fairly convincing argument for common descent. If you want an argument against ID, the best I have found so far is Michael Shermer's Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design.


Review by David Marshall, Amazon.com

Stahrwe, what is it that some Christians do not like about evolution? Could God not have created the world anyway that She wanted?

seespotrun,

The two posts I made reviewing Dicky's book were not my compositions and contained no original input by me.

But to answer your question, indeed there are a number of denominations who have compromised their beliefs to accommodate evolution. There is even a term for it, Theistic Evolution. The problem with them is that after you start compromising your beliefs you find you have nothing left. Those denominations including the Roman Catholics do not hold the Bible as much other than just a guide. My own denomination was in jeoprady of falling into the same trap in the 70's but managed to reassert its core beliefs. But to make you and the others happy, prophecy is that some day there will be a universal church which will embrace all religions and science but it will be a corrupt religion.

Nice trying to provoke me, but if you want to discuss God's gender it will have to be in a different forum.

Wow, an accidental admission. When your religion accomodates facts, you find you have nothing left.

Colin,

It was not an accidental admission of anything. My point is that if you understand something to be true, you don't mix and match, for example, Unitiarians believe in everything so in essence they don't truly believe in anything. Read G. K. Chesteron if you dare.

Stah: "My point is that if you understand something to be true..."

That's presupposing your understanding is flawless. You should always be open to new evidence. If the fact of evolution requires you admit it within your belief system, then find yourself with little left, perhaps it is your belief system that is the problem. Evolution has empirical evidence, a figurative mountain of it spanning an incredible amount of disciplines. You have faith. There really isn't any comparison, but then, if you have faith in what isn't true, you then can't mix and match and accept what is true, cause then your faith goes kaput.

It really is a shame that you're not able to critically analyze your own statements as keenly as you do the statements of others. You've just affirmed my obversation. "If you understand something to be true, you don't mix and match". Exactly, when you truly understand evolution it doesn't mix with your literal interpretation of the Bible. Something has to give and of course we know what you choose.

It's time to take the blinders off, there's a vast universe out there that you close yourself off from.

I think that is really disrespectful and it does not answer the question.



I was not trying to provoke you, really. I am not comfortable using one gender to signify God.

Let me clarify a couple of points.

#1) I went through the whole believing in evolution nonsense. Bought that crap for ten years. But the more I thought about it, the less sense it made, on the other hand, I read the Bible and it made perfect sense.

#2) Many people have a shallow understanding of what they believe and why they believe. Such people are easily persuaded to pop culture feel good fads. They are the ones who you say, "What difference does it make, we all worship the same God, right?" and they agree because they don't know any better. They will say they are Christians if you ask them, but they little or no clue what that means.

Ok.

This is priceless. You've rejected evolution because it's just so farfetched and ridiculous, but the Bible with its omniscient being and and miracles and all it's internal inconsistencies makes more sense to you?

Let me ask (against my better judgment), do you, in fact, reject all science, or only the bits that conflict with your religion? Also, do you get a flu shot every year?

There's the book for you, Stahrwe.

I've seen a lot of people's lives ruined by junk science.