As a person with a working brain, I accept fully the theory of evolution, rather than embracing silly supernatural biological "concepts" like creationism or its goofy little brother, intelligent design. Evolution is logical, self-consistent, and has withstood the most intense scientific scrutiny for 150 years, such that it enjoys universal support among the scientific community. Some argue that evolution is "only a theory" - so is gravity and the germ theory of infection. Evolution is equally well-proven and uncontroversial among those who consider the evidence for each.
Yet, not trained in biology, I wasn't especially up on the details, so I thought I'd read the two books most opposite on the timeline of evolutionary publication: Charles Darwin's original Origin of Species and Richard Dawkins' brand-new The Greatest Show on Earth. Needless to say, I haven't switched teams, and I won't be apologizing to Ben Stein any time soon. It's possible that some might label my approach to the subject as close-minded, but if taking the side of an absolute landslide of facts and evidence rigorously proven over 150 years over an absurd book of ancient myths is close-minded, then I guess you're right.
First Darwin, the English naturalist whose insights after years of dedicated study of plants and animals led him to develop the brilliant theory of evolution by natural selection. Darwin waited some 20 years after first formulating the idea to publish, finally spurred on by the similar discoveries of naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace. Darwin ultimately receives more credit today both because he did indeed have priority to the claim, and because Wallace incorrectly held humankind as separate from the theory.
Anyway, Origin of Species is both really brilliant and interesting, and really long and boring. Its chief problem is that it was written in the mid-19th century, when authors primarily wrote with a style that Dave Barry has comically dubbed "the boring method." There's no getting around this - it's excessively dull and dry. Darwin supports his points with all sorts of examples of animals no one's ever heard of, going on and on while simultaneously (and ironically) apologizing for being so brief. Where modern science writers footnote references for the sake of brevity and clarity, Darwin just includes them in the text. There is precisely one figure among 375 pages of text. I don't fault him for the book's structure, because that's how such works were published back then, but that's the reality facing the 21st-century reader.
On the other hand, Darwin does use his vast array of examples to support a diverse array of points, and even if he didn't get everything exactly right, one realizes the remarkable foresight and accuracy of his deductions, and the lengths to which he goes to support and develop them. The breadth of his knowledge of the animal and plant kingdoms is startling. There's almost nothing in the text that he doesn't claim to have performed experiments to observe, which is funny after a while because whenever he's developing a point you know it's coming: "In my own experiments..."
Next to the ideas themselves, the really remarkable thing about Origin of Species is how deftly Darwin anticipates and refutes claims of his contemporaries who opposed him, believing in independent creation of species. Why is this so remarkable? Because they're the exact same claims these people are making today. Irreducible complexity. The absence of intermediate forms. Unnecessary body parts. I can't believe the Second Law of Thermodynamics doesn't show up. People are still making the same lame arguments that should have been resolved right here in the original text. Fascinating. My favorite part is Darwin's refutation of the concept of irreducible complexity, opening with his famous (and oft-misquoted) passage about the marvelous eye. He spends much of a chapter demolishing the half-baked arguments of a poor Mr. Mivart, who assembled all of the major objections to Darwin's ideas and thus is most ripe for a takedown. Mivart suffers from the same lack of imagination as most of today's evolutionary critics, claiming that "natural selection is incompetent to account for the incipient stages of useful structures," when of course it quite well is competent. Mivart falls into the same trap as the people who populate today's Discovery Institute, asking a bunch of lazy unintellectual rhetorical questions without really thinking about them. Darwin methodically dismissing all the notable objections to his theory is great, even if his ruminations on worker bees tend to the tedious at times.
This is a book far easier to admire than to read. I'd go for the Cliff Notes.
Dawkins, however, has the advantage of the intervening 150 years of discovery and modern technology, as well as his own gift for communicating difficult scientific ideas, and brings them to bear fully on The Greatest Show on Earth. This is a modern book aimed at a modern readership, and if it naturally doesn't have the same force of insight as Darwin, it's far more useful to someone interested in the subject. In particular, appearing after the synthesis of Darwin's theory of natural selection with modern genetics adds considerable clarity to Dawkins' arguments.
Dawkins is probably best known as the author of The God Delusion, the 2006 Atheist manifesto that inspired (and still does) my own outspoken atheism and elevated Dawkins to the status of one of my Intellectual Heroes along with Zakaria, Asimov, and others. Yet he consciously steers clear of most religion-bashing here:
This book is about the positive evidence that evolution is a fact. It is not intended as an anti-religiou book. I've done that, it's another t-shirt, this is not the place to wear it again.
Dawkins mostly sticks to this approach, though he does sharply criticize creationists, whom he refers to as "history-deniers." Note that, though the two camps overlap considerably, there are many people of faith who accept the fact of evolution.
With that understanding reached, Dawkins proceeds to artfully and logically lay out the formidable, air-tight case for evolution. He disposes with some creationist canards, notably:
- "If humans descended from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?
We didn't descend from monkeys. We have a common ancestor. Different. We share a common ancestor with, literally, every organism on earth.
- "I'll believe in evolution when I see a monkey give birth to a human baby."
You're a fucking idiot if you say this. Evolution takes place very, very slowly, over many generations.
- "The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that evolution is impossible."
The 2nd Law applies only to closed systems, which the Earth is not. Plus, evolution isn't the only example of order from disorder - look at crystalline materials or snowflakes. I hate when people try to use science they don't understand to disprove scientifically sound points.
To lay the groundwork for evolution, Dawkins first outlines the basic mechanics by which it works and carefully describes the timescales over which macroevolution operates. But in case that's too grand for some to understand, he provides several examples of evolution happening "right before our very eyes"; lizards off the coast of Croatia, guppies, and a set of incredibly elegant E. coli experiments by Michigan State biologist Richard Lenski. These to me are particularly compelling because of how easily they can be observed and understood. More than any other evidence, this seems to me compeltely irrefutable. I cannot even conceptualize of an alternate explanation for these short-time-span phenomena, and I'm glad Dawkins included them.
Next up: fossils. Evolution-deniers are fond of criticizing the fossil record - even though it's remarkably rich, they view any "gap" as positive evidence for creation or intelligent design. Dawkins asserts that the case for evolution is air-tight even without any fossils - the fact that we have so very many of them is a nice bonus. Dawkins spends several chapters describing the striking similarities between the bone structures of various mammals, particularly hands and skulls. I had no idea a bat wing was so similar to my own hand! To those who continue to claim inadequacies in the fossil record, Dawkins titles a sub-chapter on museums, simply, "Just go and look."
It's worth pointing out here that there are some tremendous color nature photographs in this book. For those like me who may have found Darwin a bit dry, a picture here and there livens things up considerably.
Dawkins crushes the inane notion of "intelligent design" (I will not capitalize the initial letters) with a chapter called "History written all over us." There are countless, countless examples of un-intelligent design present in all evolved organisms, relics of a time when they may have in fact proven useful. Dawkins explains that as bodies slowly evolved to their current forms, the marginal cost of a particular artifact was small, though over time they've reached a state where they're quite unnecessary and inconvenient, yet the "major upheaval" required to reach an optimal state is quite unlikely to take place. Easily the most memorable example of this is the male human reproductive system, which many of you have varying degrees of familiarity with. Basically, the balls used to be way up high in mammals, and the vas deferens, the tube that carries sperm to the penis, naturally led straight down to its target. Well, as you may have observed, the nuts are now located much further down. What you probably don't know is that the VD doesn't travel the short distance we might expect. Nope; during the evolutionary descent to their present path, the VD got hooked on the ureter, so it takes this ridiculous detour way the hell up and back down, like 10 times as far as it needs to go.
If there is an intelligent designer, he's an absolute moron.
Before summarizing his work, Dawkins spends some time describing "evolutionary arms races," The constant co-evolution of predator and prey by natural selection wherein the former develop increased faculties for killing their food and prey improve their odds of getting the hell away of predators. I wish I could say I was curious how id people try to explain these phenomena.
These books are both excellent in their own way, though Dawkins' is more readable and far more instructive. The sad part is that people who didn't believe in evolution before probably still won't. Those who deny evolution do so for reasons outside the realms of rational thought and evidence, and are such that no possible amount of facts and proof can change their mind. If someone is unwilling to join the reality-based community, as so many creationists are, it's impossible to argue a point logically. Every fact, no matter how rooted in the real world, can just be explained away as God's doing without any further thought. It's really quite frustrating. For the evolution/creation "conflict" (I use quote marks because there is no reasonable conflict) to ever be resolved, either the evolution people need to stop using reason and logic, or the creation side needs to embrace a natural worldview. Neither will happen overnight, but the side of reason is making gains every year thanks to books like these.
