Since Darwin's time, nearly all of the missing parts of his argument have been filled in, as Dawkins explains here. Even with those provisos, the case was unanswerable. Darwin did not try to humiliate them, and he honestly admitted that there were important parts of the story he did not yet understand. There were a thousand more pieces of evidence, and they gave up. It was even more impossible for them to explain, not just that kangaroos only exist in Australia, but that many similar species - wallabies, koalas, wombats and other marsupials - also only exist in Australia.

Darwin's Victorian audience thought carefully about the sloths, and could not find a sensible answer. If the story of the Biblical Flood were true, then those slow-moving, tree-dwelling sloths would somehow have had to migrate from Mount Ararat to Brazil in a few thousand years, leaving no colonies anywhere en route. Just stop and think for a moment about the single fact that sloths are only to be found in South America. The clearest and most unanswerable part of the argument is the geographical distribution of the different kinds of animals. He shows that even though Darwin didn't understand how evolution works - no one knew about DNA yet, or even the basics of genetic theory - the evidence at his disposal produced an overwhelming case that evolution must be the the root cause of the huge diversity of observed species. Despite all this, Darwin found arguments which soon convinced a large part of his audience that their ideas about Young Earth Creationism were wrong.ĭawkins continually quotes Darwin. Darwin had a great deal of sympathy for the Creationist position, and one of his own favorite books, which influenced him deeply, was the Creationist classic Natural Theology, by William Paley. When Darwin wrote it, pretty much everyone in the world was a Young Earth Creationist. Instead, I suggest that you might want to look at Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. Dawkins is disrespectful and arrogant about Young Earth Creationism, and he will only annoy you. In fact, I'm not going to do that.ĭon't read this book. You're probably expecting I'll tell you to read Dawkins's latest book. It's to your credit: you're willing to find out something about what the other side has to say. To any Young Earth Creationist who happens to be reading this reviewįirst, thank you for getting this far.

The greatest show on earth book review