Q4 in process #2

            For my fourth quarter independent reading book, I chose a book by Richard Dawkins, an author of books that I have read before. Dawkins is an opinionated man, and this is never truer than in his book The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. In this book, Dawkins presents the evidence for the theory of evolution, the biological theory for the origin of life that was first proposed by Charles Darwin. Dawkins’ goal with this book is to convince super religious people, whom he calls “ridiculous” and “ignorant,” that evolution is how life came about, and not by God 6000 years ago. I think that Dawkins is the ridiculous one for thinking that this strategy would work.

            In our world, science is black and white. Ideas, theories, hypotheses, they are all either correct or incorrect; anything less than correct is not good enough to a scientist. This helps explain the workings of Dawkins’ mind, who is a true scientist at heart, but this works against him when he tries to convey science to the public. There is a conflict here between the black and white nature of science and the way people debate issues in their minds. A regular, non-scientist person’s set of beliefs is not the product of a black and white, impartial, objective evaluator of the evidence available. Instead, people form their views from what other people tell them, how other people tell them, what makes more sense, and what other people believe. While Dawkins is putting a lot of effort into clarifying why evolution makes the most sense, the way that Dawkins is telling this to people is downright insulting. A religious person reading this book might put it down after the first chapter because Dawkins compares people who do not believe in evolution to people who deny the holocaust, saying, “the evidence for evolution is at least as strong as the evidence for the Holocaust” (Dawkins 7). The holocaust is one of the most serious faults in human action in history, and to throw the word at the people he wants to communicate with is evidence of one of three things: Dawkins is childish and wants to insult people who don’t agree with him; Dawkins wants to make clear how strong his stance is; or Dawkins does not know how to communicate. I doubt the first one given that Dawkins is a professional, but the last two go hand in hand. Dawkins is making clear his stance, but is overdoing it.

            I think an important idea that I have taken out of this book is this idea of effective communication. It isn’t the focus of the book, or even anything that Dawkins talks about beyond saying that evolution needs to be more clear to everyone, but it is an idea that is central to the success of this book and any other books that are trying to entertain a certain audience of a new or disputed idea. This book is the case in point of why this idea is so important: all the thorough science and logical reasoning in it might have been wasted at the hands of poor communication.