Lazy agnostic's guide to evolution

Now, I have to get something off my chest first. Creationists always say that "evolution is only a theory -- even scientists say that it's a theory."

What is made abundantly clear is that creationists don't know that the word "theory" has a different meaning in science from what it means in ordinary English.

• A theory in ordinary English is an educated guess, more or less based on observation. (More like a hypothesis.)
  
  
• A theory in scientific terms summarizes a hypothesis or group of hypotheses that have been supported with repeated testing. Basically, a theory is an accepted hypothesis. According to Wikipedia, a theory "has no equally acceptable or more acceptable alternative theory, and has survived attempts at falsification."

(Don't get me started on what else creationists don't know. It would take multiple lifetimes. They are like Sarah Palin, who thinks dinosaurs and humans walked the earth together 6,000 years ago, and who famously belitted fruit fly research during the 2008 election. Watch Richard Wolffe ream Palin: "The most mindless, ignorant, uninformed comment." That's starting about 5:00 into the video clip.)

Now for the main event.

John C. Snider of American Freethought (let's give him a big hand) is sitting down to read Richard Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution.

Snider is trying a different tack. Instead of writing a review, he is making summaries of the 13 chapters of Dawkins' book.

What Snider has written so far:

The Greatest Show on Earth, Chapter 1: Only a Theory

The Greatest Show on Earth, Chapter 2: Dogs, Cows and Cabbages

The Greatest Show on Earth, Chapter 3: The Primrose Path to Macro-evolution

The Greatest Show on Earth, Chapter 4: Silence and Slow Time

The Greatest Show on Earth, Chapter 5: Before Our Very Eyes

The Greatest Show on Earth, Chapter 6: Missing Link? What do you mean, 'missing'?

The Greatest Show on Earth, Chapter 7: Missing Persons? Missing No Longer

Updated on Oct. 22, 2009 with the rest of the chapters:

The Greatest Show on Earth, Chapter 8: You did it yourself in nine months

The Greatest Show on Earth, Chapter 9: The Ark of the continents

The Greatest Show on Earth, Chapter 10: The tree of cousinship

The Greatest Show on Earth, Chapter 11: History written all over us

The Greatest Show on Earth, Chapter 12: Arms races and 'evolutionary theodicy'

The Greatest Show on Earth, Chapter 13: There is grandeur in this view of life