Richard Dawkins - The Greatest Show on Earth

This book lays out the evidence for evolution, which is second only to gravity in terms of Things Supported By So Much Evidence that They're Only Disputed by the Wilfully Ignorant and/or the Intellectually Dishonest, so it's not as though it should be a hard sell. And the evidence that Dawkins gives, from the effects of artificial selection among dog breeders and orchid growers to the effect of environment on creatures like bacteria and guppies (whose life spans are short enough that changes can be easily mapped by humans) is impossible to dispute without being deliberately contrary.

So why does this book irk me? Like his The God Delusion, Dawkins is laying out a well-supported, exhaustively referenced chain of reasoning to reach a watertight conclusion, but there's something shrill about his tone that is unlikely to seduce the skeptical reader. While there's no doubting Dawkins' intellectual chops or knowledge of the subject, his aggressive approach lacks the charm of, say, Carl Sagan or Stephen Jay Gould – or, for that matter, Charles Darwin – who were masters at infusing their (logically flawless) arguments with a very human wonder at the power of natural selection. It's not the content that's lacking: it's the delivery.

Dawkins is absolutely correct in saying that evolution is a fact, not a theory (at least, not in the sense that "theory" is generally understood outside of its specifically scientific definition) but there are too many times his brittle, if perfectly reasonable, fury with the deliberate lies of the Intelligent Design lobby obscure the simplicity, beauty and jaw-droppingly clear explanative power of evolution. The world needs a clear, engaging book for general readers explaining the extraordinary story of life on Earth but, infuriatingly, The Greatest Show on Earth isn't quite it.

More book reviews and literary events in Sydney? Sign up to our weekly newsletter