The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution

by Richard Dawkins

  p. 283 the most authoritative recent book on speciation: Coyne and Orr (2004).

  CHAPTER 10: THE TREE OF COUSINSHIP

  p. 317 It was by this method, using rabbits: Sarich and Wilson (1967).

  p. 322 The earliest large-scale study along these lines was done by a group of geneticists in New Zealand: Penny et al. (1982).

  p. 330 It’s well worth downloading the Hillis tree from his website: www.zo.utexas.edu/faculty/antisense/DownloadfilesToL.html.

  p. 335 Yan Wong and I discussed them fully in ‘The Epilogue to the Velvet Worm’s Tale’: Dawkins (2004).

  CHAPTER 11: HISTORY WRITTEN ALL OVER US

  p. 340 ‘Mr Sutton, the intelligent keeper in the Zoological Gardens’: Darwin (1872), 95, 96, 97.

  p. 341 In an 1845 communication to the Royal Society: Sibson (1848).

  p. 346–7 J. W. S. Pringle . . . was mainly responsible for working out how halteres work: Pringle (1948).

  p. 353 ‘If an optician wanted to sell me an instrument which had all these defects’: Helmholtz (1881), 194.

  p. 355 ‘For the eye has every possible defect that can be found in an optical instrument’: Helmholtz (1881), 201.

  p. 362 ‘Despite possession of a well developed larynx and a gregarious nature, the Giraffe is able to utter only low moans or bleats’: Harrison (1980).

  p. 370 ‘I cannot persuade myself’: Darwin (1887b).

  p. 370 fn. Not to be confused with another Australian: M. Denton, Nature’s Destiny (New York: Free Press, 2002).

  p. 371 ‘patchwork of makeshift s’: C. S. Pittendrigh, ‘Adaptation, natural selection, and behavior’, in A. Roe and G. G. Simpson, eds, Behavior and Evolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958).

  CHAPTER 12: ARMS RACES AND ‘EVOLUTIONARY THEODICY’

  p. 380 The five fastest runners among mammal species: List from http://www.petsdo.com/blog/top-twenty-20-fastest-land-animals-including-humans.

  p. 382 My colleague John Krebs and I published a paper on the subject in 1979: Dawkins and Krebs (1979).

  p. 382 ‘Before asserting that the deceptive appearance’: Cott (1940), 158–9.

  pp. 383–4 And there are even, though it may seem surprising, arms races between males and females within a species, and between parents and offspring: See Dawkins (2006), chs 8 and 9, ‘Battle of the generations’ and ‘Battle of the sexes’.

  p. 390 ‘What a book a devil’s chaplain might write’: Darwin (1903).

  p. 390 ‘[N]ature is neither kind nor unkind’: Dawkins (1995), ch. 4, ‘God’s utility function’.

  p. 394 As a matter of interest, there are aberrant individuals who cannot feel pain: For examples, see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4195437.stm, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6379795/.

  p. 395 Stephen Jay Gould reflected on such matters in a nice essay on ‘Non-moral nature’: Reproduced in Gould (1983).

  CHAPTER 13: THERE IS GRANDEUR IN THIS VIEW OF LIFE

  p. 399 ‘Thus, from the war of nature’: Darwin (1859), 490.

  p. 400 ‘it may not be a logical deduction’: Darwin (1859), 243.

  p. 401 ‘All that we can do’: Darwin (1859), 78.

  p. 404 ‘But I have long regretted’: Darwin (1887c).

  p. 410 ways in which, to quote one of their papers, the frozen accident might be ‘thawed’: Söll and RajBhandary (2006).

  p. 410 And the physicist Paul Davies has made the reasonable point: Davies and Lineweaver (2005).

  p. 412 but it is a matter for intriguing speculation how different life would be if we had no orbiting moon: Comins (1993).

  p. 417 ‘On the same subject my father wrote in 1871’: Darwin (1887c).

  p. 423 In 1989 I wrote a paper called ‘The evolution of evolvability’: Dawkins (1989).

  p. 426 It is no accident, as cosmologists point out to us, that we see stars in our sky: See e.g. Smolin (1997).

  APPENDIX: THE HISTORY-DENIERS

  p. 429 At irregular but frequent intervals since 1982: Gallup poll numbers taken from ‘Evolution, creationism, intelligent design’, http://www.gallup.com/poll/21814/Evolution-Creationism-Intelligent-Design.aspx.

  p. 430 In 2008 the Pew Forum published a similar poll: Pew poll numbers taken from ‘Public divided on origins of life’, conducted 17 July 2005, http://pewforum.org/surveys/origins/.

  p. 431 What about Britain? How do we compare? Ipsos MORI poll numbers taken from ‘BBC survey on the origins of life’, conducted 5–10 Jan. 2006, http://www.ipsos-mori.com/content/bbc-survey-on-the-origins-of-life.ashx.

  p. 432 A more ambitious survey: Eurobarometer 224 survey numbers taken from ‘Europeans, science and technology’, conducted Jan.–Feb. 2005, http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_224_report_en.pdf.

  p. 432 the deplorable fact that it comes out only just ahead of Turkey in such matters has been given much publicity: Miller et al. (2006).

  p. 434 Some of the horror stories they had to tell deserve wide attention: ‘Emory workshop teaches teachers how to teach evolution’, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 24 Oct. 2008.

  p. 436 ‘Muslim medical students in London distributed leaflets that dismissed Darwin’s theories as false’: ‘Academics fight rise of creationism at universities’, Guardian, 21 Feb. 2006.

  p. 437 ‘It’s a real social change’: ‘Creationism debate moves to Britain’, Independent, 18 May 2006.

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