Book Review – The Greatest Show on Earth, Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins is one of my favorite authors, in the same league as Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Neil deGrasse Tyson. What stands out in the works of these people is their unwavering loyalty to Truth and Reason. They are not the sort of persons that can take an affront to Knowledge lying down. All of them are outright atheists that don’t mince words when it comes to attacking the superstitious and stupid religious beliefs. 

This is the third work of Dawkins that I am reading, after having gone through ‘The God Delusion’ and ‘The Magic of Reality’. Dawkins continues in the same vein as in those two books, but this book is turning the heat up for the ‘Creationists’ – those that believe that a god created this universe, our planet and all the life forms that populate it, within the last 10000 years or so. Dawkins builds a citadel from which the Evolutionists – those of us that believe that the planet Earth is about 4.6 billion years and all the life forms that we see in front of our eyes today evolved through natural genetic modification – can fight the ignorance of the ‘Creationists’. 

And, what a citadel has he built! I don’t think that a staunch believer of the religious version of ‘Creation’ will be moved by this book well enough to reverse his/her views, but this book will nevertheless end up causing a dent in his/her belief. Be it plants, animals or the multitude of bacterial and vermin life forms, Dawkins pulls them all up to stand as witness to the survival of their ancestors in the long gone past and their evolution by ‘natural selection’. Dawkins also arms all the ‘Evolutionists’ and ‘Darwinists’ with enough arsenal to fight back the stupid questions raised by the ‘Creationists’. ‘If men evolved from monkeys why are there monkeys still around?’, for example.

But one thing that I couldn’t stomach in this book is that, while trying to build a citadel of facts and arguments strong enough to be unassailable by the ‘Creationists’, Dawkins seems to have become too obsessed with the details to the extent of ignoring the normal, laymen like me that couldn’t grasp science beyond a certain level, at least for now. You need to have a fair knowledge of genes to understand the book. In the previous two books, I found the words of Dawkins having a smooth flow. The same is lacking here. His random jumping between the topics and cross-referencing details in other chapters and even in his other books doesn’t make matters easy either. 

A good book to read, if you prefer reading books that are slow and heavy. Though this lacks the usual flow and wit of Richard Dawkins, it is a worthy shot in the arm if you are someone that ends up arguing with the ‘Believers’ every now and then.