The Greatest show on Earth
  - The evidence for evolution.
  Richard Dawkins 2009.

  Amazon review January 17th 2010.
  (Five stars out of five). 

  Nature is utterly amazing.
-----------------------------

  Many flowers guide bees in to land by little runway
markings, painted on the flower in ultraviolet pigments,
which the human eye can't see.
  Why - Because for the flower, insect pollination
represents a huge advance in economy over the wasteful
scattergun of wind pollination.
  Insects on the other hand, by choosing the most
attractive flowers to visit, breed for floral beauty,
while the flowers breed the insects for pollination ability.
  
  Obviously, according to evolution, the wonderful spectacle 
of the flowers and the bees came about as an evolutionary process.
  Evolution is a falsifiable theory, and therefore
a scientific theory.  Mammals haven't be around for all of
the Earths history - so you wouldn't expect to find
mammal remains in old Earth layers, like e.g. Devonian rock.
And indeed no one have. If someone were to find
a mammal in say Cambrian rocks, evolution would be
blown apart.
  In the words of J.B.S. Haldane: "Fossil rabbits in the 
Precambrian is no good" (for the theory of evolution).

  Instead, the world is just stuffed with evidence for
evolution - and this book goes through a lot
of this evidence. And quite a treat it is.

  Obviously, we can debate for ever what ''fact'' and
''evidence'' really means. In the book a ''fact'' is defined as 
something that really occurred, or is known to be true by 
observation or authentic testimony. 
  Biologists, and Richard Dawkins in particular, seems
awful sure about what is fact and what is not. 
Physicists on the other hand, through quantum physics and more,
live in a world where ''fact'' is a somewhat slippery concept.
Trained in mathematics myself - mathematicians tend to
believe in abstract beauty, which is ''fact'', whereas
the world around us is a fata morgana you can believe in or
not. Depending on the time of day.... or if you have some mathematics
at hand that can explain what you see.
  My only grievance about this book (and
other books by Richard Dawkins), is his ''religious'' belief
in certain ''facts'' and his vendetta against people who doesn't
believe in these true ''facts''. 
  In the world of evolution, surely you should be able to believe that
the Moon is a green cheese, if that helps you survive. 
No reason to be so upset!? 

  But with so much at stake, our entire existence actually,
passions run high. 
  Take eugenic breeding of humans. The book doesn't say 
it is impossible (everyone agrees that it is immoral).
On the contrary - you could breed a race of superior body builders,
pearl fishers .... and much worse ... superior musicians,
poets and high IQ people.
  And if evolution say you could probably do that - would you then rather
believe in something else? In Richard Dawkins words: "Upholding
the origin myth of a particular set of Bronze age desert tribesmen" ?

  The secret of evolution is the mind numbing big numbers.
Take bacteria. The E.Coli is a common bacterium.
Very common. About a billion of them are in your large intestine
at this moment. Harmless or even beneficial - they are 
a part of ''you''. How this weird ''you'' came about
is explained by evolution though the mind numbing eons of time.

  What is a million years? In human terms it is app. 45.000
generations. Which takes us back to the days of the Homo Erectus ...
a time where we were not even Homo Sapiens... 
  Some 100.000 years ago a roving band of Homo Sapiens -
looking pretty much like us - left Africa and diversified
to all the races we see today.
  The Turkana Boy of some 1.6 million years ago would
have been 1.8 meters tall (as an adult) and have had a brain of about 900 cubic
centimetres (cc). Typical for Homo erectus. Larger than the earlier Homo
habilis (600 cc), which in turn is larger than the earlier
Lucy - Australopithecus (400 cc). 
  The human story, from 3 million years ago to recent times,
is a tale of increasing brain size.

  But, according to evolution,  there is no overall
plan of development, no blueprint, no architects plan.
All is achived by local rules implemented by cells.
Cells interacting with other cells on a local basis.
Inside cells, local rules apply to molecules, proteins,
interacting with other molecules.
  The nervous system wires itself up, not
by following an overall blueprint - but by neurons 
axons seeking out end organs with which they have a chemical affinity.
Local units following local rules. Cells 
that bristle with ''labels'' that enable them
to find their ''partners'' (Sperry).
  The genes that survive are those that are good at building bodies.
Sexual selection, social environments, ecology and what have 
you, determines what is good and what is not so good.  

  It is all about the small steps.
  E.g. Lemurs live in Madagascar. Nowhere else. The story is
not that when Noahs Ark landed at mount Araret in Turkey -
the lemurs all decided to walk down to Madagascar 
(swimming the last stretch to the island).
No, the lemurs is of course a long story of small changes according
to evolutionary rules from some predecessor animal.
  E.g. The evolution of the human skull is a series of changes
in the rates of growth of some parts relative to other parts,
controlled by genes in the developing embryo (D'Arcy Thompsons
transformations).

  Not necessarily leading to the best design - just ''good enough''.
Take the eye. Apparently designed by a complete idiot.
Where the photocells point in the wrong direction,
making it necessary for the wires that carry their data
to pass through the retina and back into the brain.
Leaving a hole - the blind spot - which takes a lot 
of ''photo shop'' brain software to get rid of again.

  No designer would plan a design like this. Only history
and evolution could end up here. 
  And so it is, with a lot of what we see in nature. If forests were designed -
they could be much smaller. I.e. a forest ''of friendship'' could
agree to be only 10 feet tall. Much more efficient than the uncontrolled
(not designed) competition for sunlight that makes forest trees a 100 feet
tall. 

  ''Undesigned'' evolution.
  The greatest show on Earth. 

-Simon
   
Simon Laub
www.simonlaub.net