Interessante a resenha 'louvaminhice' de Steve Jones...
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The Greatest Show on Earth: the Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins: reviewSteve Jones hails Richard Dawkins's new book, which brings together his thinking on Darwin
By Steve Jones
Published: 6:15AM BST 19 Sep 2009
To wrestle with a blancmange is, in my experience, a mistake. Pink, sickly and smug, the sugary pudding happily takes any number of blows, absorbs the attack, quivers a bit and comes back – unperturbed – as a blancmange.
Creationists have the same talent. For them, evidence is of no interest. I once told someone who used the enormous gap in the fossil record between the chimp-human ancestor and modern chimpanzees as evidence against evolution that it had been partly filled: an ancestral chimp half a million years old had just been found. His face lit up: “See,” he said. “Now there are two gaps!”
Richard Dawkins’s new book (which he describes as his “missing link”, presenting as it does the complete Darwinian case rather than – as in his earlier works – exploring parts in detail) gives the fact-rejecters their just deserts. He sets out to polish off their flummery. Dawkins compares creationists to Holocaust deniers and spoons, with relish, an acid sauce of mockery onto that absurd confection of half-baked ideas.
In this anniversary year, the polls are depressing. More than two thirds of Egyptians have never heard of evolution and almost half of all Turks think that men and dinosaurs lived at the same time. Even those dastardly Lamarckians the French score slightly higher (at 80 per cent) in the belief that humans evolved from animals than the British do. The early pages of The Greatest Show on Earth exude a certain exasperation that we have to go through this stuff again. Soon, though, the author’s enthusiasm comes to the surface.
The book is full of evidence, some familiar and some new. Its case is presented in a manner succinct, clear and sometimes vivid. A meadow full of flowers – those sexual advertisements – is nature’s Piccadilly Circus. Creationists point out the absence of the “crocoduck” – the transitional form between modern reptile and modern bird supposedly needed if evolution is true – but Dawkins retaliates with the “octopard”: the ancient shared ancestor, not the living intermediate, of octopus and leopard.
The passage from egg to adult played an important part in Darwin’s case, as it does here. Dawkins criticises the simplistic idea of DNA as an instruction manual, and the embryo as a sort of Ikea flat-pack that assembles itself through a set of simple (or not so simple) rules.
Fossils, too, are telling evidence for shared descent, but evolution does not need them to make its case, for we can see it happening before our eyes. I was fascinated to learn that, in 1971, Belgian scientists transferred a group of lizards from one small island off the Yugoslav coast to another, free of native members of that species, nearby. During that same summer, a few miles inland in the wild backwoods of Croatia, I myself was hard at work moving thousands of snails between habitats in the hope of picking up differences in survival. Thirty-seven years later, the descendants of the transferred lizards had changed – evolved – to gain stronger jaws and a modified gut to deal with their new and more vegetarian diet; but, alas, just a year after moving the molluscs I could find almost none of them (which proves not that evolution is wrong but that experiments in the wild usually do not work).
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