The first lesson to be learned from Richard Dawkins’ new book is a purely practical maxim: One should always do what one does best, while scrupulously avoiding those tasks for which neither nature nor tuition has equipped one. This is not, obviously, what one could call a moral counsel; it is merely a counsel of prudence. Another way of saying it would be, try not to make a fool of yourself. Of course, folly is something of a relative judgment. It is often the case, especially in the world of publishing, that the most lucrative course is to do things very, very badly. The richest novelists tend to be those who cannot write; and the more poorly they write, the richer they are likely to become. The most successful purveyors of popular history, popular political polemic, popular religion, popular philosophy, popular atheism—and so on—are those who know only as much about their subjects as is necessary to make a stir and absolutely nothing more. And one has to concede that no other book by Richard Dawkins has sold nearly as well as The God Delusion, his majestically maladroit adventure in the realm of abstract ideas. So, weighing things solely in the balances of financial gain, one should perhaps not be too captious regarding his recent publications on the God question.

Still, there was a time when Dawkins enjoyed a deserved reputation for his contributions to the popular exposition of evolutionary science and theory without yet having acquired his entirely undeserved reputation as a powerful advocate for atheism.

The Selfish Gene, despite occasional propositions of an almost metaphysical variety, is, for the most part, an excellent introduction to one of the more fascinating areas of modern biological science and speculation. And, generally, whenever Dawkins has confined himself to topics within his field of expertise, he has produced well-organized, lucidly written guidebooks to the current scene in the life sciences.

With The Greatest Show on Earth, Dawkins has returned to what he does best. He makes occasional mention of subjects he ought not to touch on—Plato, for instance, or the “great chain of being,” or God—with predictable imprecision; but these are only momentary deviations. The purpose of the book is simply to lay out, as clearly as possible, the evidence for the truth of special evolution. It recently occurred to him, he says, that over the years he has written about evolutionary theory but never taken the time to provide his reasons for believing in it for those who have not had the benefit of his training. And this is what he does here, very well, proceeding by discrete steps: the observable plasticity of plant and animal species, the verifiability of macro-evolution, the geological record of the earth’s age, the fossil evidence (including the wealth of fossil remains of intermediate special forms), observable and experimental mutation, morphology, genetics, and so forth. In short, The Greatest Show on Earth is an ideal précis of the evolutionary sciences and the current state of evolutionary theory that can be recommended for the convinced and the unconvinced alike.

Dawkins’ special reason for having written this book, as perhaps need not be said, is his own frustration over the sheer number of persons in the world today who continue to refuse to believe either in special evolution or in its entirely immanent causal mechanisms. Although the book is, for the most part, wholly “positive” in its argument, it is nonetheless explicitly directed toward two targets: young-earth creationists and the intelligent design movement. In regard to the former, of course, he does not really need to expend much energy. After all, ranged against their beliefs is nothing less than the entire universe and every physical datum it comprises. In regard to the latter, however, he does feel the need to exert himself; and, while some of his arguments are solvent enough, others are no more sophisticated than the positions they are meant to refute.

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In the second section—or “fit”—of Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark, the Bellman lectures the crew of his ship on the peculiar traits of the creature they have just crossed an ocean to find. There are, he tells his men, “five unmistakable marks” by which genuine Snarks may be known. First is the taste, “meagre and hollow, but crisp: / Like a coat that is rather too tight in the waist, / With a flavour of Will-o-the wisp.” Second is the Snark's “habit of getting up late,” which is so pronounced that it frequently breakfasts at tea time and “dines on the following day.” Third is “its slowness in taking a jest,” evident in its sighs of distress when a joke is ventured and in the grave expression it assumes on hearing a pun. Fourth is its “fondness for bathing-machines,” which it thinks improve the scenery, and fifth is ambition.

Then, having enumerated the beast's most significant general traits, the Bellman proceeds to dilate on its special variants:

"It next will be right
To describe each particular batch:
Distinguishing those that have feathers, and bite,
From those that have whiskers, and scratch."

He never completes his taxonomy, however. He begins to explain that, while most Snarks are quite harmless, some unfortunately are Boojums, but he is almost immediately forced to stop because, at the sound of that word, the Baker has fainted away in terror.

The entire passage is a splendid specimen of Carroll's nonpareil gift for capturing the voice of authority—or, rather, the authoritative tone of voice, which is, as often as not, entirely unrelated to any actual authority on the speaker's part—in all its special cadences, inflections, and modulations. And what makes these particular verses so delightful is the way in which they mimic a certain style of exhaustive empirical exactitude while producing a conceptual result of utter vacuity.

Perhaps that is what makes them seem so exquisitely germane to Daniel Dennett's most recent book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. This, I hasten to add, is neither a frivolous nor a malicious remark. The Bellman—like almost all of Carroll's characters—is a rigorously, even remorselessly rational person and is moreover a figure cast in a decidedly heroic mould. But, if one sets out in pursuit of beasts as fantastic, elusive, and protean as either Snarks or religion, one can proceed from only the vaguest idea of what one is looking for. So it is no great wonder that, in the special precision with which they define their respective quarries, in the quantity of farraginous detail they amass, in their insensibility to the incoherence of the portraits they have produced—in fact, in all things but felicity of expression—the Bellman and Dennett sound much alike.

Dennett, of course, is a widely known professor of philosophy at Tufts University, a codirector of the Center for Cognitive Studies, also at Tufts, and a self-avowed “Darwinian fundamentalist.” That is to say, he is not merely a Darwinian; rather, he is a dogmatic materialist who believes that Darwin's and Wallace's discovery of natural selection provides us with a complete narrative of the origin and essence of all reality: physical, biological, psychological, and cultural. And in Breaking the Spell, Dennett sets out to offer an evolutionary account of human religion, to propose further scientific investigations of religion to be undertaken by competent researchers, and to suggest what forms of public policy we might wish, as a society, to adopt in regard to religion, once we have begun to acquire a proper understanding of its nature. It is, in short, David Hume's old project of a natural history of religion, embellished with haphazard lashings of modern evolutionary theory and embittered with draughts of dreary authoritarianism.

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