Controversial evolutionary biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins spoke at Duke to promote his new book, “The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution,” and discuss his ideas on the subject Sunday.
Dawkins went chapter by chapter explaining the book to a sold-out Page Auditorium and an additional crowd watching from Griffith Film Theater via a live feed.
He started his speech by saying that it is time for people to stop calling evolution a theory and instead refer to it as a fact. The word “theory,” which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as a hypothesis and a speculation, does not reflect the evidence currently available, he explained.
“The fact of our own existence is the most unbelievable fact you’ll ever be asked to believe,” Dawkins said.
Dawkins was invited to Duke by Todd Stiefel, Trinity ’97. Stiefel, a trustee at the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, told the audience that the foundation’s goals are to support science and reason through education and evidence and to combat religion-based discrimination and religious fundamentalism.
Dawkins said one of the challenges science and reason face today comes from the 40 percent of the U.S. population that does not accept evolution and instead believes that Earth is less than 10,000 years old. He said creationists pose a threat because they home-school their children, control school boards, have members in Congress and even have presidential candidates. Depriving children of the truth of how they came to be is comparable to child abuse, he added.
Even though humans are not eyewitnesses in the evolution process, he said there is still a large amount of evidence supporting it. To explain, Dawkins used the metaphor of detectives arriving at the scene of a crime after the crime had been committed, where clues such as fingerprints and footprints correspond to DNA and fossils.
“We can go through the laws of physics and say it’s no accident we see stars in our sky,” Dawkins said.
Though many opponents of evolution insist that fossils disprove the fact, Dawkins said humans are fortunate to have fossils in the first place, and added that no anachronistic fossil has ever been found.
Additionally, he said the geographic distribution of animals fits precisely with projections by people studying evolution.
“Why would all those marsupials have migrated en masse from Mount Ararat to Australia, not stopping along the way?” he asked, referring to the location where many believe Noah’s Ark made landfall. “Why did all the penguins undertake the mass migration south to the Antarctic and not the equally-hospitable Arctic?”
Despite its precision, he said evolution is not without its design flaws.
“Evolution cannot go back to the drawing board,” Dawkins said. “It has to improve step by step, generation by generation.”
Durham resident Brooke Heston called the speech inspiring, saying it was a “call to arms to stand up and express voice of reason.”
Sophomore Max Kagan said he was disappointed that there were no dissenting views in the audience.
“I was a little disappointed no one confronted him,” he said. “The questions were, ‘I agree with you, what can I do?’ I hoped theists on campus would have challenged him.”
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