Evolution is not just a theory. It's fact.

Unfortunately, that's news for some 40 percent of the American population, including Texas' clueless State Board of Education.

Richard Dawkins, a fierce critic of the intelligent design crowd, blew into The Wortham Center, to lay down the evolutionary truth, now gloriously detailed in his new book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution.

A sold-out crowd showed up for the secular shindig put on by The Progressive Forum, one of the nation's leading civic lecture organizations dedicated to progressive values. Founded by Randall R. Morton, The Forum celebrates its fifth anniversary of nurturing Houston's vibrant intellectual life through lectures by leading thinkers of our time.

Dawkins burst on the scene in 1976 with his ground-breaking book The Selfish Gene, which laid out his thinking of a design-less universe, followed up by The Blind Watchmaker in 1986. His best-selling book, The God Delusion, serves as a manifesto for atheists worldwide. Dawkins may be controversial in his methods, but his scholarship is always airtight. His new book arms anyone with enough evidence to put the matter to rest.

Dawkins wasted no time getting down to business by plowing through the gems of each chapter in his book. If you want to understand how a Pekinese is related to a wolf, head to Chapter 2, "Dogs, Cows and Cabbages," which looks at the power of domestic selection. The botanically inclined will appreciate Chapter 3, "The Primrose Path to Macro-Evolution," which chronicles artificial selection to "Darwin's gigantic discovery of natural selection" though the flower world. Those who still believe that dinosaurs walked the earth with humans can finally get their facts straight in Chapter 4, "Silence and Slow Time," where Dawkins covers the numerous and reliable ways we have of dating the earth.

The world is 4.6 billion years old. Get over it people.

Crashing through the key points from each chapter with boundless enthusiasm, Dawkins concluded the lecture portion of his talk with a sense of awe at the evolutionary process.

"There is no escape. Evolution is fact," he said.

The author brought up the delusional evolution deniers numerous times.

"The fact that 40 percent of Americans think the earth is less than 10,000 years old is not a trivial error," he said.

There were also some well-deserved jabs at Texas, not only in our political leaders, but in the disastrous to science antics recently played out by the Texas Board of Education. He poked fun at intelligent design by elaborating on the meandering path of our laryngeal nerve, which takes an astonishing detour.

"It dives right down into the chest, loops around one of the main arteries leaving the heart, and then heads back up the neck to its destination," he writes in Chapter 11, "History is Written all Over Us."

"No designer would have done that," Dawkins bellowed, evoking thunderous laughter from the crowd.

He even offered tips for dealing with creationists, who mistakenly claim that there's gaps in the fossil record.

"Of course there's gaps in the fossil record," Dawkins insisted. "If we didn't have a single fossil, evolutionary theory would still be secure."

Post-lecture questions included inquiries on cellular intelligence ("Rubbish," he responded) to challenges to the ethics of atheism. According to Dawkins, we don't get our morals from the Bible anymore. He rallied against the cherry picking of values practiced by fundamentalist Christians.

He also spoke eloquently on his first encounter with Charles Darwin's ideas as a youth.

The final question, "What are the new frontiers of evolutionary science?" found the acerbic scientist in a poetic mood. The piece of the puzzle left unsolved, Dawkins said, comes down to, "How did consciousness evolve?"

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