EVOLUTION- the greatest story never told: "There is no architects's plan, no architect."

Steve Jones went through a lot of the same menu a decade ago in Almost Like a Whale. But the topics are all laid out with that combination of clarity and verve that is Dawkins's hallmark, and pursued to his customary conclusion: "There is no architects's plan, no architect."

The fact is that both continuous and discontinuous change happens in fossil lineages, and this poses interesting questions about what species mean, questions that Dawkins simply ignores.

SHOOT: The writer criticises Dawkins unfairly I think; obviously you will find holes in the data in the fossil records of rocks. Some records may be lost in lava fields or deep beneath the Earth's crust, or simply not yet discovered. Once again, to fill an unknown with an even greater unknown [God] that explains the earlier unknown is at best fanciful.

clipped from www.guardian.co.uk This latest addition to the Dawkins canon is his summary of the vast array of evidence supporting the science. Palaeontology, embryology, anatomy, genetics, artificial breeding and geography are all grist to his evolutionary mill. Dawkins's writing demonstrates once again his consummate skill as an explainer. He never makes assumptions about prior knowledge; when he chooses an analogy it does actually cast light on the thing to be explained (some scientists seem to find this extraordinarily difficult); and occasionally he coins a brilliant phrase. The Galápagos islands were Darwin's natural laboratory, and here they appear once again. The dramatic detour taken by the laryngeal nerve in mammals, the convergence between the wings of bats and extinct pterodactyls, the discovery of a whole gallery of human ape fossil "links", the deciphering of the human genome, the development of the human embryo – they all line up in what would be termed in an American university "Evolution 101".