The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution
By Richard Dawkins
Bantam Press £20, 470 pages
FT Bookshop price: £16

A new book by Richard Dawkins is one of the most eagerly anticipated events in popular science publishing. The Greatest Show on Earth, his eighth full-length exposition of evolution, will delight most Dawkins fans. He describes and explains the astonishing biological processes of natural selection as powerfully as ever. While the general approach is familiar from Dawkins’ previous work, there are plenty of fresh examples.

Two chapters caught my imagination. One describes recent work on the way evolution influences embryonic development – a field sometimes known as evo-devo. As Dawkins shows, the widely used analogy of DNA as a “blueprint” for the organism is misleading.

There is no overall plan of development, no blueprint, no architect’s plan, no architect. Rather, the embryo grows according to local rules encoded in the genes of individual cells interacting with neighbouring cells. Genes are switched on and off by local biochemical signals. As Dawkins says, “this way of generating large and complex structures by the execution of local rules is distinct from the blueprint way of doing things”.

The second high spot is Dawkins’ description of the way every organism has its evolutionary history written all over it. This produces many internal structures that are less efficient than they would be if they had been “designed”. An example is the “recurrent laryngeal nerve” that links the brain and voice box. This takes an astonishing detour in mammals, via the chest and heart, because it has evolved from more primitive ancestors. In giraffes that means a 15ft diversion down the neck and back again.

When Dawkins watched the laryngeal nerve being dissected in a giraffe, he realised the external elegance of animals is an illusion. A real animal is a criss-crossing maze of blood vessels, nerves, intestines, fat, muscles and more.

Despite its many brilliant passages, I finished The Greatest Show on Earth with a sense of dissatisfaction. The problem stems from the way Dawkins frames the book – as a direct riposte to what he says is growing creationist opposition to evolutionary theory. He says his previous books “didn’t discuss the evidence for evolution itself ... did not present the actual evidence that evolution is a fact”. That may surprise readers of, say, The Blind Watchmaker.

I think Dawkins, the militant atheist, could not resist the opportunity to take another shot at religion after the success of his last book, The God Delusion, and the continuing political controversy over creationism. Throughout this book he calls creationists “history­-deniers”, a deliberately inflammatory reference to Holocaust-deniers. Forcing science lessons to include biblical creation and its modernised versions such as intelligent design is comparable to making history teachers consider the “alternative theory” that the Holocaust was invented by Zionists, he says.

And I doubt his assertion that opposition to Darwinian evolution is stronger than ever. Yes, creationists and allies are becoming more vocal and receiving more media attention, but opinion polls quoted by Dawkins show little change over the past 30 years in the number of people holding anti-evolution views. The number of Americans who believe life on Earth was created in its present form within the past 10,000 years remains at above 40 per cent. But it was just as high when Dawkins wrote his earlier books.

The Greatest Show on Earth works best when Dawkins lays aside his sometimes heavy-handed controversialism. If you want a direct response to creationism, then Jerry Coyne’s recent Why Evolution is True is your book. If you are not bothered about the “history-deniers”, no one can match the way Dawkins writes about evolution.

Clive Cookson is the FT’s science editor