This is a magnificent book of wonderstanding: Richard Dawkins combines an artist's wonder at the virtuosity of nature with a scientist's understanding of how it comes to be.

There is grandeur in this view of life" said Darwin, speaking of evolution. There is no one better qualified to convey this grandeur than his worthy successor, Richard Dawkins, who writes with passion, clarity, and wit. This may be his best book yet.

Whose 1859 masterpiece, On the Origin of Species, shook society to its core, surely would have raised an eyebrow at the current controversy over evolution. The Greatest Show on Earth is a stunning counterattack on advocates of Intelligent Design, explaining the evidence for evolution while exposing the absurdities of the creationist argument. Dawkins sifts through rich layers of scientific evidence--from living examples of natural selection to dues 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. Combining these elements and many more, he makes 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.

The Greatest -Show on Earth comes at a critical time: systematic opposition to the fact of evolution is menacing as never before. In schools around the world, insidious attempts are made to undermine the status of science in the classroom. Dawkins wields a devastating argument against this ignorance--but his unjaded passion for the natural world turns what might have been a negative argument into a positive offering to the reader:nothing less than a master's vision of life, in all its splendor.

PREFACE

Chapter 1  Only a theory?

Chapter 2  Dogs, cows and cabbages

Chapter 3  The primrose path to macro-evolution

Chapter 4  Silence and slow time

Chapter 5  Before our very eyes

Chapter 6  Missing link? What do you mean, 'missing'?

Chapter 7  Missing persons? Missing no longer

Chapter 8  You did it yourself in nine months

Chapter 9  The ark of the continents

Chapter 10  The tree of cousinship

Chapter 11  History written all over us

Chapter 12  Arms races and 'evolutionary theodicy'

Chapter 13  There is grandeur in this view of life

APPENDIX The history-deniers

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING

PICTURE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INDEX