He repeatedly compares creationists and Holocaust deniers, which is a peculiar way of reaching out to the other side. So Dawkins decided to write a book for these "history-deniers," in which he would dispassionately demonstrate the truth of evolution "beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt."Īfter only a few pages of The Greatest Show on Earth, however, it becomes clear that Dawkins doesn't do dispassionate, and that he's not particularly interested in convincing believers to believe in evolution. In fact, they actively abhorred the idea, since it seemed to contradict the Bible and diminish the role of God. Yet Dawkins also came to realize that a disturbingly large percentage of the American and British public didn't share his enthusiasm for evolution. It's the theory that makes every other theory possible. He explains that all of his previous books have naïvely assumed "the fact of evolution," which meant that he never got around to laying "out the evidence that it is true." This shouldn't be too surprising: science is an edifice of tested assumptions, and just as physicists must assume the truth of gravity before moving on to quantum mechanics, so do biologists depend on the reality of evolution. Richard Dawkins begins The Greatest Show on Earth with a short history of his writing career.
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