This is part 3 of my review of Professor Richard Dawkins’ “Royal Institution Christmas Lectures” aka “The Royal Institution Lectures for Children” Episode 1, “Waking up in the Universe” (transcript / video). When all parts have been posted I will provide a PDF format version of the entire essay.
This segment introduces us to When Artful Renditions Suffice
This series will consist of the following segments:
Part 1: The “Child Abuser”
Part 2: Grow Up, To Be Like Me
Part 3: When Artful Renditions Suffice
Part 4: Evolutionary Tree Rot
Part 5: Creation Myths
Part 6: Never Mind the Evidence
Part 7: “Faith,” Saith the Atheist
Part 8: The Atheist Extra Terrestrial
[eventually these will become hyperlinks]
When Artful Renditions Suffice
Prof. Richard Dawkins shows the children paintings of various ape to man transitions walking through pretty flowers,
“Homo Habilis…Australopithecus. He is probably a direct ancestor of this one…Ramapithecus, that would be possibly an ancestor…not just of us, but also of all the great apes…[and] an early primate.”
He continues by showing them paintings of other creatures,
“An early mammal…An insectivore…an early mammalian like reptile…An amphibian…a fish, just coming out of the water; just leaving the water, and coming to the land.”
Apparently, “probably” and “possibly” is good enough for propaganda and good enough to conclude, “Those are all your ancestors.”
Fanciful artwork plays a very important role in Dawkinsian style Darwinism: when they do not have evidence they can hire an artist to invent some. When you have a few bones, the artist can pain an entire animal.For instance, when it comes to the ape to man progressions: how do we know what the nose looked like? Cartilage does not fossilize. How do we know what the eyes looked like? With whites in their eyes like humans or without, like apes? How do we know that they had fur? How do we know how long the fur was? In fact, even dealing with the actual bones can be a very subjective business, a puzzle that you can mix and match at will:
“One point of uncertainty was the angle at which the face attached to the cranium. Alan Walker remembers an occasion when he, Michael Day, and Richard Leakey were studying the two sections of the skull. ‘You could hold the maxilla forward, and give it a long face, or you could tuck it in, making the fact short,’[1] he recalls. ‘How you held it really depended on your preconceptions. It was very interesting watching what people did with it.’ Leakey remembers the incident too: ‘Yes. If you held it one way, it looked like one thing; if you held it another, it looked like something else. But there was never any doubt that it was different. The question was, was it sufficiently different from everything else to warrant being called something new?’”[2]
What of the other creatures? In order to illustrate these you could paint virtually anything. For instance what is “an early mammalian like reptile”? This reminds me of the Ellen Degeneres joke about gluing a wig on a lizard.
What of the “fish, just coming out of the water; just leaving the water, and coming to the land”? Not long ago, some claimed that the Coelacanth was a good candidate for this fish that was a land lover at heart. We had fossils of this fish that are said to date back to 410 million years ago (and vanishing from the fossil record 65 million years ago). However, you could go diving today and find Coelacanths swimming about. Apparently, environmental pressures were such that parts of the species remain unchanged for at least 410 million years and part became the human beings that fish them, cook them up and eat them with a twist of lemon.
Here is some information for those who are interested in the interpretive aspect of paleoanthropology (more can be found here):
“Edward Tyson had earlier, in 1699, unconsciously manipulated what was to be the first scientific description of a great ape, in this case a juvenile chimpanzee…In the post-Darwinian era, throughout the history of paleoanthropology, authorities would commit Tyson’s error time and time again: Neanderthal, Piltdown, Australopithecus, Ramapithecus, Zinjanthropus—each in its turn has been the object of the exaggeration of traits favored by observers whose theories demanded them.”[3]
“the power of preconceptions, of seeing in the anatomy what you expect to see. ‘Contrary to Simons’ and my original view, Ramapithecus itself does not have a parabolic dental arcade,’[4] says Pilbeam. ‘I ‘knew’ Ramapithecus, being a hominid, would have a short face and a rounded jaw—so that’s what I saw.’[5] Pilbeam and Simons were not uniquely guilty of this error. It occurs often, such is the uncertainty of interpreting fragmentary anatomy in fossils….The clearest message of the Ramapithecus affair, however, is the power of preconceptions, which in this case led competent scientists to ignore the evidence of other competent scientists because the conclusions drawn from the evidence were at variance with established ideas. All scientists are guided to some degree by a set of assumptions, usually implicit rather than explicit. ‘I try hard to detect them in my own thinking,’ says Pilbeam, ‘to isolate those assumptions that are not articulated because they are so ‘obvious,’ yet will seem so silly a few years from now. I am also aware of the fact that, at least in my own subject of paleoanthropology, ‘theory’—heavily influenced by implicit ideas—almost always dominates ‘data’…Ideas that are totally unrelated to actual fossils have dominated theory building, which in turn strongly influences they way fossils are interpreted.’”[6]
Regarding various descriptions of Ramapithecus’ anatomy and habits:
“Here then, was a very complete picture of an animal—not just what it looked like, but also how it lived. And all based on a few fragments of upper and lower jaw and teeth…‘What we saw in the fossils was the small canines, and the rest followed, all linked together somehow. The Darwinian picture has a long tradition, and it was very powerful,’”[7] “Pilbeam and Simmons managed to maintain their support of Ramapithecus [as a hominid], however, mainly by adjusting their lines of argument in concert with the shifting evidence,”[8] “Pilbeam began to realize that the fossil material then available simply wasn’t adequate to support the kinds of sweeping conclusions that had been made,”[9] “before the decade was out Rama’s ape would be just that—an ape.”[10]
“‘One no longer has the option of considering a fossil specimen than about eight million years a hominid no matter what it looks like.’[11] In other words, he did not care whether Ramapithecus looked like Australopithecus or even Homo sapiens. It was simply too old to be a hominid….Even Louis Leakey joined in the fray, admitting first that ‘I am not qualified to discuss the biochemical evidence,’[12] and then going on to assert that it must be wrong because it was at variance with the fossil record…This initial line of criticism by the paleoanthropologists is unequivocal: the biochemistry is wrong because it doesn’t agree with the fossils. Period.”[13]
Richard Leakey made the following statement regarding Homo habilis, “Of the several dozen specimens that have been said at one time or another to belong to this species, at least half probably don’t. But there is no consensus as to which 50 percent should be excluded. No one anthropologist’s 50 percent is quite the same as another’s.”[14]
[1] Roger Lewin, Bones of Contention (New York, NY: A Touchstone Book published by Simon & Schuster Inc., 1987), p. 160 citing an interview with the author, Potomac, Maryland, 5 Aug. 1984
[2] Lewin, p. 160 citing an interview with the author, Nairobi, 21 Jan. 1985
[3] Ibid., pp. 304-305
[4] “Rethinking Human Origins,” in Discovery, vol. 13, pp. 5-6 (1978)
[5] Lewin, p. 123 citing an interview with the author, Harvard, 23 Oct. 1984
[6] Ibid., pp. 126-127 citing “Rethinking Human Origins,” in Discovery, vol. 13, pp. 8-9 (1978)
[7] Ibid., p. 95 citing an interview with the author, Harvard University, 23 Oct. 1984
[8] Ibid., p. 98
[9] Ibid., p. 103
[10] Ibid., p. 98
[11] “A Molecular Approach to the Question of Human Origins,” Background for Man, edited by V. M. Sarich and P. J. Dolhinow, published by Little, Brown, 1971, p. 76
[12] “The Relationship of African Apes, Man, and Old World Monkeys,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 67, p. 746 (1970)
[13] Lewin, pp. 105, 111
[14] Richard Leakey, Origins Reconsidered: In Search of What Makes Us Human (New York: Doubleday Religious Publishing, 1992), p. 112
Continue reading Richard Dawkins - Children in the Atheist’s Den, part 3 of 8...
