The Greatest Show on Earth

Charles Darwin, whose 1859 masterpiece, On the Origin of Species, shook society to its core, surely would have raised an eyebrow at the current controversy over evolution. The Greatest Show on Earth is a stunning counterattack on advocates of "Intelligent Design," explaining the evidence for evolution while exposing the absurdities of the creationists "argument." Dawkins sifts through rich layers of scientific evidence - from living exemples of natural selection to clues in the fossil record; from natural clocks that mark the vast epochs wherein evolution ran its course to the intricacies of developing embryos; from plate tectonics to molecular genetics. Combining these elements and many more, he makes the airtight case that "we find ourselves perched on one tiny twig in the midst of a blossoming and flourishing tree of life and it is no accident, but the direct consequence of evolution by non-random selection."
The Greatest Show on Earth comes at a critical time: systematic opposition to the fact of evolution is menacing as never before. In schools around the world, insidious attempts are made to undermine the status of science in the classroom. Dawkins wields a devastating argument against this ignorance - but his unjaded passion for the natural world turns what might have been a negative argument into a positive offering to the reader: nothing less than a master's vision of life, in all its splendor.