Read The Greatest Show on Earth Page 44


  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.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING

  Adams, D. and Carwardine, M. 1991. Last Chance to See. London: Pan.

  Atkins, P. W. 1984. The Second Law. New York: Scientific American.

  Atkins, P. W. 1995. The Periodic Kingdom. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

  Atkins, P. W. 2001. The Elements of Physical Chemistry: With Applications in Biology. New York: W. H. Freeman.

  Atkins, P. W. and Jones, L. 1997. Chemistry: Molecules, Matter and Change, 3rd rev. edn. New York: W. H. Freeman.

  Ayala, F. J. 2006. Darwin and Intelligent Design. Minneapolis: Fortress.

  Barash, D. P. and Barash, N. R. 2005. Madame Bovary’s Ovaries: A Darwinian Look at Literature. New York: Delacorte.

  Barlow, G. W. 2002. The Cichlid Fishes: Nature’s Grand Experiment in Evolution, 1st pb edn. Cambridge, Mass.: Basic Books.

  Berry, R. J. and Hallam, A. 1986. The Collins Encyclopedia of Animal Evolution. London: Collins.

  Bodmer, W. and McKie, R. 1994. The Book of Man: The Quest to Discover Our Genetic Heritage. London: Little, Brown.

  Brenner, S. 2003. ‘Nature’s gift to science’, in T. Frängsmyr, ed., Les Prix Nobel, The Nobel Prizes 2002: Nobel Prizes, Presentations, Biographies and Lectures, 274–82. Stockholm: The Nobel Foundation.

  Brooks, A. C. and Buss, I. O. 1962. ‘Trend in tusk size of the Uganda elephant’, Mammalia, 26, 10–34.

  Browne, J. 1996. Charles Darwin, vol. 1:Voyaging . London: Pimlico.

  Browne, J. 2003. Charles Darwin, vol. 2:The Power of Place . London: Pimlico.

  Cain, A. J. 1954. Animal Species and their Evolution. London: Hutchinson.

  Cairns-Smith, A. G. 1985. Seven Clues to the Origin of Life: A Scientific Detective Story. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  Carroll, S. B. 2006. The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution. New York: W. W. Norton.

  Censky, E. J., Hodge, K. and Dudley, J. 1998. ‘Over-water dispersal of lizards due to hurricanes’, Nature, 395, 556.

  Charlesworth, B. and Charlesworth, D. 2003. Evolution: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Clack, J. A. 2002. Gaining Ground: The Origin and Evolution of Tetrapods. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

  Comins, N. F. 1993. What If the Moon Didn’t Exist? Voyages to Earths that Might Have Been. New York: HarperCollins.

  Conway Morris, S. 2003. Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  Coppinger, R. and Coppinger, L. 2001. Dogs: A Startling New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behaviour and Evolution. New York: Scribner.<
br />
  Cott, H. B. 1940. Adaptive Coloration in Animals. London: Methuen.

  Coyne, J. A. 2009. Why Evolution is True. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Coyne, J. A. and Orr, H. A. 2004. Speciation. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer.

  Crick, F. H. C. 1981. Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature. London: Macdonald.

  Cronin, H. 1991. The Ant and the Peacock: Altruism and Sexual Selection from Darwin to Today. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  Damon, P. E.; Donahue, D. J.; Gore, B. H.; Hatheway, A. L.; Jull, A. J. T.; Linick, T. W.; Sercel, P. J.; Toolin, L. J.; Bronk, R.; Hall, E. T.; Hedges, R. E. M.; Housley, R.; Law, I. A.; Perry, C.; Bonani, G.; Trumbore, S.; Woelfli, W.; Ambers, J. C.; Bowman, S. G. E.; Leese, M. N.; and Tite, M. S. 1989. ‘Radiocarbon dating of the Shroud of Turin’, Nature, 337, 611–15.

  Darwin, C. 1845. Journal of researches into the natural history and geology of the countries visited during the voyage of H.M.S. Beagle round the world, under the Command of Capt. Fitz Roy, R.N., 2nd edn. London: John Murray.

  Darwin, C. 1859. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, 1st edn. London: John Murray.

  Darwin, C. 1868. The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, 2 vols. London: John Murray.

  Darwin, C. 1871. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2 vols. London: John Murray.

  Darwin, C. 1872. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. London: John Murray.

  Darwin, C. 1882. The Various Contrivances by which Orchids are Fertilised by Insects. London: John Murray.

  Darwin, C. 1887a. The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, vol. 1. London: John Murray.

  Darwin, C. 1887b. The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, vol. 2. London: John Murray.

  Darwin, C. 1887c. The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, vol. 3. London: John Murray.

  Darwin, C. 1903. More Letters of Charles Darwin: A Record of his Work in a Series of Hitherto Unpublished Letters, 2 vols. London: John Murray.

  Darwin, C. and Wallace, A. R. 1859. ‘On the tendency of species to form varieties; and on the perpetuation of varieties and species by natural means of selection’, Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnaean Society (Zoology), 3, 45–62.

  Davies, N. B. 2000. Cuckoos, Cowbirds and Other Cheats. London: T. & A. D. Poyser.

  Davies, P. C. W. 1998. The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin of Life. London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press.

  Davies, P. C. W. and Lineweaver, C. H. 2005. ‘Finding a second sample of life on earth’, Astrobiology, 5, 154–63.

  Dawkins, R. 1986. The Blind Watchmaker. London: Longman.

  Dawkins, R. 1989. ‘The evolution of evolvability’, in C. E. Langton, ed., Artificial Life, 201–20. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley.

  Dawkins, R. 1995. River Out of Eden. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

  Dawkins, R. 1996. Climbing Mount Improbable. London: Viking.

  Dawkins, R. 1998. Unweaving the Rainbow. London: Penguin.

  Dawkins, R. 1999. The Extended Phenotype, rev. edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Dawkins, R. 2004. The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

  Dawkins, R. 2006. The Selfish Gene, 30th anniversary edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (First publ. 1976.)

  Dawkins, R. and Krebs, J. R. 1979. ‘Arms races between and within species’,

  Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B, 205, 489–511.

  de Panafieu, J.-B. and Gries, P. 2007. Evolution in Action: Natural History through Spectacular Skeletons. London: Thames & Hudson.

  Dennett, D. 1995. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. London: Allen Lane.

  Desmond, A. and Moore, J. 1991. Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist. London: Michael Joseph.

  Diamond, J. 1991. The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee: Evolution and Human Life. London: Radius.

  Domning, D. P. 2001. ‘The earliest known fully quadrupedal sirenian’, Nature, 413, 625–7.

  Dubois, E. 1935. ‘On the gibbon-like appearance of Pithecanthropus erectus’,

  Proceedings of the Section of Sciences of the Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen, 38, 578–85.

  Dudley, J. W. and Lambert, R. J. 1992. ‘Ninety generations of selection for oil and protein in maize’, Maydica, 37, 81–7.

  Eltz, T.; Roubik, D. W.; and Lunau, K. 2005. ‘Experience-dependent choices ensure species-specific fragrance accumulation in male orchid bees’, Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 59, 149–56.

  Endler, J. A. 1980. ‘Natural selection on color patterns in Poecilia reticulata’, Evolution, 34, 76–91.

  Endler, J. A. 1983. ‘Natural and sexual selection on color patterns in poeciliid fishes’, Environmental Biology of Fishes, 9, 173–90.

  Endler, J. A. 1986. Natural Selection in the Wild. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

  Fisher, R. A. 1999. The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection: A Complete Variorum Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Fortey, R. 1997. Life: An Unauthorised Biography. A Natural History of the First Four Thousand Million Years of Life on Earth. London: HarperCollins.

  Fortey, R. 2000. Trilobite: Eyewitness to Evolution. London: HarperCollins. The Greatest Show on Earth 450

  Futuyma, D. J. 1998. Evolutionary Biology, 3rd edn. Sunderland, Mass.: Sinauer.

  Gillespie, N. C. 1979. Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

  Goldschmidt, T. 1996. Darwin’s Dreampond: Drama in Lake Victoria. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

  Gould, S. J. 1977. Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

  Gould, S. J. 1978. Ever since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History. London: Burnett Books / Andre Deutsch.

  Gould, S. J. 1983. Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes. New York: W. W. Norton. Grafen, A. 1989. Evolution and its Influence. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gribbin, J. and Cherfas, J. 2001. The First Chimpanzee: In Search of Human Origins. London: Penguin.

  Haeckel, E. 1974. Art Forms in Nature. New York: Dover.

  Haldane, J. B. S. 1985. On Being the Right Size and Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Hallam, A. and Wignall, P. B. 1997. Mass Extinctions and their Aftermath. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Hamilton, W. D. 1996. Narrow Roads of Gene Land, vol. 1: Evolution of Social Behaviour. Oxford: W. H. Freeman / Spektrum.

  Hamilton, W. D. 2001. Narrow Roads of Gene Land, vol. 2:Evolution of Sex . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  Harrison, D. F. N. 1980. ‘Biomechanics of the giraffe larynx and trachea’, Acta Oto-Laryngology and Otology, 89, 258–64.

  Harrison, D. F. N. 1981. ‘Fibre size frequency in the recurrent laryngeal nerves of man and giraffe’, Acta Oto-Laryngology and Otology, 91, 383–9.

  Helmholtz, H. von. 1881. Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects, 2nd edn, trans. E. Atkinson. London: Longmans.

  Herrel, A.; Huyghe, K.; Vanhooydonck, B.; Backeljau, T.; Breugelmans, K.; Grbac, I.; Van Damme, R.; and Irschick, D. J. 2008. ‘Rapid large-scale evolutionary divergence in morphology and performance associated with exploitation of a different dietary resource’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105, 4792–5.

  Herrel, A.; Vanhooydonck, B.; and Van Damme, R. 2004. ‘Omnivory in lacertid lizards: adaptive evolution or constraint?’ Journal of Evolutionary Biology, 17, 974–84.

  Horvitz, H. R. 2003. ‘Worms, life and death’, in T. Frängsmyr, ed., Les Prix Nobel, The Nobel Prizes 2002: Nobel Prizes, Presentations, Biographies and Lectures, 320–51. Stockholm: The Nobel Foundation.

  Huxley, J. 1942. Evolution: The Modern Synthesis. London: Allen & Unwin.

  Huxley, J. 1957. New Bottles for New Wine: Essays. London: Chatto & Windus.

  Ji, Q.; Luo, Z.-X.; Yuan, C.-X.; Wible, J. R.; Zhang, J.-P.; and Georgi, J. A. 2002. ‘The earliest known eutherian mammal’, Nature, 416, 816–22.

  Johanson, D. and Edgar, B. 199
6. From Lucy to Language. New York: Simon & Schuster.

  Johanson, D. C. and Edey, M. A. 1981. Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind. London: Granada.

  Jones, S. 1993. The Language of the Genes: Biology, History and the Evolutionary Future. London: HarperCollins.

  Jones, S. 1999. Almost Like a Whale: The Origin of Species Updated. London: Doubleday.

  Joyce, W. G. and Gauthier, J. A. 2004. ‘Palaeoecology of Triassic stem turtles sheds new light on turtle origins’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B, 271, 1–5.

  Keynes, R. 2001. Annie’s Box: Charles Darwin, his Daughter and Human Evolution. London: Fourth Estate.

  Kimura, M. 1983. The Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  Kingdon, J. 1990. Island Africa. London: Collins.

  Kingdon, J. 1993. Self-Made Man and his Undoing. London: Simon & Schuster.

  Kingdon, J. 2003. Lowly Origin: Where, When, and Why our Ancestors First Stood Up. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

  Kitcher, P. 1983. Abusing Science: The Case Against Creationism. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.

  Leakey, R. 1994. The Origin of Humankind. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

  Leakey, R. and Lewin, R. 1992. Origins Reconsidered: In Search of What Makes Us Human. London: Little, Brown.

  Leakey, R. and Lewin, R. 1996. The Sixth Extinction: Biodiversity and its Survival. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

  Lenski, R. E. and Travisano, M. 1994. ‘Dynamics of adaptation and diversification: a 10,000-generation experiment with bacterial populations’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 91, 6808–14.

  Li, C.; Wu, X.-C.; Rieppel, O.; Wang, L.-T.; and Zhao, L.-J. 2008. ‘An ancestral turtle from the Late Triassic of southwestern China’, Nature, 456, 497– 501.

  Lorenz, K. 2002. Man Meets Dog, 2nd edn. London: Routledge.

  Malthus, T. R. 2007. An Essay on the Principle of Population. New York: Dover. (First publ. 1798.)

  Marchant, J. 1916. Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, vol. 1. London: Cassell.