Richard Dawkins Talk

Richard Dawkins signing copies of his book The Greatest Show on Earth and talking at Menlo School.

10/6/09

On Monday the renowned British scientist and scholar Richard Dawkins came in to Menlo School and talked about theories of evolution during assembly. Dawkins talked about the power of evidence and observation, multiple reasons supporting the evolution theory and criticized Creationists in front of an attentive student body and throng of parents.

Richard Dawkins has written many international bestsellers, including The Greatest Show on Earth, which summarizes evolution and hundreds of scholarly articles. He is very controversial and opinionated in a touchy field for many and has appeared on, and been poked fun at the tv shows "The Colbert Report" and "Southpark."

Dawkins started off by talking about how fact can only be obtained through evidence and observation in a letter he wrote to his 10-year old daughter. He logically explained why tradition, authority and revelation are not reliable sources of fact.

All stories, he used the example of Greek mythology, were made up at some point a long time ago. Just because they get passed down from generation to generation over hundreds of years does not make it any more credible. The story is still false.

Richard Dawkins used the pope as an example for authority. Millions of Christians around the world see whatever the pope says as truth; they believe in whatever the authority says.

Lastly Dawkins, somewhat coldly dismissed spiritual revelation as a source of truth. His reasoning was logical, but almost seemed to sneer at the idea of anyone believing in something because of a religious revelation.

Next Dawkins briefly talked about reasons that support the theory of evolution. He discussed how fossils support this idea and how many species of animals, including humans, share the same genes. The lineage of all life on Earth can be placed on a big tree starting with just a bacteria cell because of all these shared genes.

Charles Darwin's study of animals in the Galapagos Islands was brought up when Dawkins said the geographic distribution of animals supported evolution. A group of lizards would get blown from the mainland of South America to one of the Galapagos Islands in a storm and they would adapt and reproduce. Then in another less freak accident they would get blown to a neighboring island and evolve in a slightly different manner because of the differences in their lifestyles. There are examples of animals with slight differences all across the world that are in concentrated clumps and this supports evolution.

To defend the notion that the Earth is 4.6 billion years old, and not 6,000 years, according to Creationists, Dawkins said that the radioactive decay of rocks and fossils showed the Earth's true age. Scientists can use the amount of carbon left in a natural object and figure out its age because of the constant rate of decay.

I got the feeling that Richard Dawkins was supposed to talk about evolution, and not just criticize the idea of Creationism. By the end of the talk though he had cracked multiple jokes at Creationists' expense (Intelligent design is just Creationism in a cheap tuxedo. Intelligent design is the padded bra of Creationists.) and had started to delve into that issue when the students asked him questions. Because this is such a sensitive issue I don't think the Menlo administration wanted to keep him onstage while he bashed Christians's beliefs.

Pics taken by Pete Zivkov:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/menlophoto/3985989340/

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