09.20.09
The suspicious luxury of arguing with creationists, too easy
the Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins: review
I haven’t read Dawkins’ new book yet (my copy arrives on Thursday, if I am lucky), but I am already pretty well ready to tear the book to pieces, still another one of those seemingly conclusive books for Dawkins fans (and that mutant side species, the Dawkins groupie with his/its diet of pseudoscience) that doesn’t achieve much of anything, except to make the case all over again for microevolution against the easy target of Creationism. With Creationists the wrong-headed Dawkins can argue with a group that is actually more confused than he is. Few reject the ‘fact of evolution’ so I am wondering if this assault on Creationists isn’t a secret confession of retreat, not on evolution, but on its mechanism.
The examples the reviewer discusses, for example, of lizards, simply aren’t convincing arguments in general for the mechanism of evolution, although they demonstrate the process of microevolution very well.
As to the missing links being filled, finally, that is true, up to a point, but the case against Darwinism is treacherous: the issue of missing links is confused by critics. It is not that there is no sequential demonstration of evolution, but that the ‘missing links’, numberless in their near infinitude, that would result from natural selection in true piecemeal fashion, are missing. We see a series of stages that demonstrate evolution, but not how it occurred.
Further, as in the case of man, we can’t say how he evolved given the record of chimps to hominids that we see, because the fossil record shows almost nothing about what he thought, did, or said, that is, about consciousness, wilful acts, and language, or about the culture that accompanied these novelties.
And, more, we are confronted with a suspicious rapid transition to homo sapiens sapiens from homo sapiens ( a distinction no longer in fashion ) in the last two hundred to one hundred or less thousand years. An immense change occurred, for which no explanation is available.
So I would be wary of creationists, but they can face the reality that man becoming man was a complex creature that Darwinists can’t even describe, let alone describe how the features so described could have evolved.
So, perhaps, it is not remarkable that Dawkins after so many years is still battling with creationists. They may be silly people, but when the chips are down they are the only ‘rationalists’ who can see that the man who is really man couldn’t have evolved by Darwinian methods, and if that man has a ‘soul’, a horrible word, or part of his organism that is beyond space and time (as elementary kantianism suggests), then even the fact of evolution is, technically, at risk, since something out of space and time couldn’t evolve at all.
I fear it may be unconscious doubt (and the big bucks for this gravy train of bestsellers) that may be driving Dawkins to write all these books trying to convince creationists, who will never be convinced.
Richard Dawkins’s new book (which he describes as his “missing link”, presenting as it does the complete Darwinian case rather than – as in his earlier works – exploring parts in detail) gives the fact-rejecters their just deserts. He sets out to polish off their flummery. Dawkins compares creationists to Holocaust deniers and spoons, with relish, an acid sauce of mockery onto that absurd confection of half-baked ideas.
In this anniversary year, the polls are depressing. More than two thirds of Egyptians have never heard of evolution and almost half of all Turks think that men and dinosaurs lived at the same time. Even those dastardly Lamarckians the French score slightly higher (at 80 per cent) in the belief that humans evolved from animals than the British do. The early pages of The Greatest Show on Earth exude a certain exasperation that we have to go through this stuff again. Soon, though, the author’s enthusiasm comes to the surface.
The book is full of evidence, some familiar and some new. Its case is presented in a manner succinct, clear and sometimes vivid. A meadow full of flowers – those sexual advertisements – is nature’s Piccadilly Circus. Creationists point out the absence of the “crocoduck” – the transitional form between modern reptile and modern bird supposedly needed if evolution is true – but Dawkins retaliates with the “octopard”: the ancient shared ancestor, not the living intermediate, of octopus and leopard.