The Greatest Show on Earth (2009) (edit title/settings)

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Characters/People edit see section history

• Rainer: RD's best book, unfortunately the german title is misleading.

Quotes edit see section history

• “...at any moment somebody might dig up a mammal in Cambrian rocks, and the theory of evolution would be instantly blown apart if they did. Evolution, in other words, is falsifiable, and therefore scientific, theory.”

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• modern species don’t evolve into other modern species, they just share ancestors: they are cousins.

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• When you notice a characteristic of an animal and ask what its Darwinian survival value is, you may be asking the wrong question. It could be that the characteristic you have picked out is not the one that matters. It may have ‘come along for the ride’, dragged along in evolution by some other characteristic to which it is pleiotropically linked.

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• More than 40 per cent of Americans deny that humans evolved from other animals, and think that we – and by implication all of life – were created by God within the last 10,000 years.

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• Mutations are the random changes in genes that constitute the raw material for evolution by non-random selection.

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• Perfection in one department must be bought, in the form of a sacrifice in another department.

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• They recognize a widespread phenomenon called ‘pleiotropy’, whereby genes have more than one effect, seemingly unconnected.

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• Biologists often make a distinction between the fact of evolution (all living things are cousins), and the theory of what drives it (they usually mean natural selection, and they may contrast it with rival theories such as Lamarck’s theory of ‘use and disuse’ and the ‘inheritance of acquired characteristics’).

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• Artificial selection is not just an analogy for natural selection. Artificial selection constitutes a true experimental – as opposed to observational – test of the hypothesis that selection causes evolutionary change.

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• There is no permanent rabbitiness, no essence of rabbit hanging in the sky, just populations of furry, long-eared, coprophagous, whisker-twitching individuals, showing a statistical distribution of variation in size, shape, colour and proclivities.

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• 4 Without any kind of choosing agent, those individuals that are ‘chosen’ by the fact that they happen to possess superior equipment to survive are the most likely to reproduce, and therefore to pass on the genes for possessing superior equipment. Therefore every gene pool, in every species, tends to become filled with genes for making superior equipment for survival and reproduction.

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First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Series & Lists edit see section history

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Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Richard Dawkins (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: QH366.2 .D374 2009
• Dewey: 576.8

Notes for Parents edit see section history

Some concepts are complex. Altough written with a straight-forward language, some knowledge is assumed.

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Professional & Technical › Professional Science › Biological Sciences › Biology
• Books › Science › Biological Sciences › Biology
• Books › Professional & Technical › Professional Science › Evolution
• Books › Science › Evolution

More Books Like This edit see section history

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