Richard Dawkins has an excellent summary of the idea of evolution in this week's New Scientist, in an article titled "The world's ten biggest ideas". Here it is—it's a very clear, short, six paragraph explanation of a big idea, fewer than 600 words. Now if only everyone could just understand this: The world is divided into things that look designed (like birds and airliners) and things that don't (rocks and mountains). Things that look designed are divided into those that really are designed (submarines and tin openers) and those that aren't (sharks and hedgehogs). The diagnostic of things that look (or are) designed is that their parts are assembled in ways that are statistically improbable in a functional direction. They do something well: for instance, fly. Darwinian natural selection can produce an uncanny illusion of design. An engineer would be hard put to decide whether a bird or a plane was the more aerodynamically elegant. So powerful is the illus...