Not too many people remember James Ussher (1581-1656) today. He was the Archbishop of Armagh and using Old Testament records, deduced the earth was created on the evening of Saturday, 22nd October, 4004 BCE. Rather oddly, the production quality in this book is shoddy. However, Richard Dawkins’s academic credentials are anything but shoddy. But his influence transcends that of a pioneering and successful academic, since he is a popular writer too. That began with The Selfish Gene (1976), followed by The Extended Phenotype (1982), The Blind Watchmaker (1986) and The God Delusion (2006).

That Richard Dawkins writes extremely well is undeniable. His work on evolutionary biology has been seminal. But Dawkins is also a critic of creationism and intelligent design. He is an atheist (and a militant one at that) and scientific rationalist, taking on religion, alternative medicine, astrology, spiritualism and other similar stuff, often through documentaries. This book isn’t about those broader issues. It’s limited to evidence for evolution.

Do we still need evidence for evolution? Evidently, we do, because those whom Dawkins describes as “history-deniers” are more pervasive in their influence than we think. The opinion polls given in the appendix are revealing. In 2008, 44 per cent of Americans believed “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so”. In Britain, 22 per cent believe “God created human kind pretty much in his/her present form at one time within the last 10,000 years”. This book is full of nuggets, not just in the text, but also in the footnotes. There is one such quote from (British zoologist) Peter Medawar: “The spread of secondary and latterly of tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought”.

... contd.