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A review by countessjess
The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins
4.0
Richard Dawkins seems to have a way of writing that is fun and easy to read. He explains more complex things, sure, but in a way that doesn’t overwhelm readers who have no scientific background.
I picked this book up because I enjoy evolutionary biology and thought it would be fun to read a book on it, rather than a textbook. Dawkins covers a lot of different aspects of evolution, using a lot of different analogies to help explain what he is trying to get across. He uses interesting real-world examples and has a sort of underlying wit that makes the book flow nicely. The statistics listed at the end of the book regarding the amount of people who believe things such as “humans lived at the same time as dinosaurs,” “the world is less than 10,000 years old,” “the earth orbits the sun once a month” and simply deny evolution altogether made me want to weep for humanity. With such easy access to information such as that contained in this book, which requires no scientific background and even just the slightest scrap of intelligence to understand the basic ideas provided within, I don’t understand how people are content with being so ignorant. But I digress. This book is good.
I picked this book up because I enjoy evolutionary biology and thought it would be fun to read a book on it, rather than a textbook. Dawkins covers a lot of different aspects of evolution, using a lot of different analogies to help explain what he is trying to get across. He uses interesting real-world examples and has a sort of underlying wit that makes the book flow nicely. The statistics listed at the end of the book regarding the amount of people who believe things such as “humans lived at the same time as dinosaurs,” “the world is less than 10,000 years old,” “the earth orbits the sun once a month” and simply deny evolution altogether made me want to weep for humanity. With such easy access to information such as that contained in this book, which requires no scientific background and even just the slightest scrap of intelligence to understand the basic ideas provided within, I don’t understand how people are content with being so ignorant. But I digress. This book is good.