Playboy Interivew: Richard Dawkins Busts Creation Canards
For those who actually "read" Playboy, Richard Dawkins answers some hard questions.
Playboy Interivew: Richard Dawkins Busts Creation Canards
Starting next month I’ll be moonlighting for another blog – the esteemed Knight Science Journalism Tracker. As this is a slow season, the current Trackers asked me if I wanted to warm up with some guest posts. For my first entry, I chose an interview with Richard Dawkins that appeared in, of all places, Playboy.
Overall I liked the interview, which meandered through atheism, science and religion, death, morality, creationist canards and even animal rights. I did think the piece was too long to sustain interest with the Q&A format, unless perhaps readers were simultaneously “entertaining” themselves with the T&A. Read the post here.
(Warning - clicking on the Playboy link within the piece may call up some Adult images)
Comments (3)
Dawkins: "But if you think about it, there are major groups of animals that have no fossils. For example, today we saw in the natural history museum an almost microscopic creature called a tardigrade. They don’t fossilize because they’re soft. Presumably before the Cambrian, most of the ancestors of the Cambrian creatures were soft and small....Their descendants existed in the Cambrian, so unless you seriously think they were created in the Cambrian, they must have existed. You may say that’s
not evidence, and I’m saying you could say the same of any soft creature for which we have no fossils. How do we know it wasn’t created in 1800? It doesn’t make sense."
Jellyfish consist entirely of soft body tissues. How does Dawkins explain the existence of jellyfish fossils, in view of his argument that soft body tissues of missing intermediate forms did not fossilize?
Testing a theory experimentally is most efficiently done by disproving, not proving. Dawkins' statement in Time Magazine (Aug. 15, 2005) that a single hippo or rabbit fossil in Precambrian rock "would blow
evolution out of the water" underscores the point.
Although no hippo or rabbit fossil has been found in Precambrian rock, microfossils of pollen, spores, angiosperms, gymnosperms, and at least one winged insect have been found in Precambrian rock.
So why haven't these discoveries blown evolution out of the water?
— dab- See:
Stainforth, R. M., "Occurance of Pollen and Spores in the Roraima Formation of Venezuela and British Guiana", Nature, 1966, 210, pp. 292-296.
Sahni, B., "Age of the Saline Series in the Salt Range of the Punjab", Nature, 1944, 153, p. 462.)
To Sahni, this meant the Salt Range Formation must be Eocene. He later found plant fragments not only in the kallar (thin layers of saline earth) but in associated solid rock layers composed of dolomite and shale. In his report, Sahni (1945, p. x) said "stringent precautions" were taken to prevent contamination of the samples with modern organic remains. He also emphasized that samples were taken from locations where the geological evidence ruled out intrusion from younger strata.
Although modern geological reports acknowledge overthrusts in the Salt Range, they unanimously declare the Salt Range Formation to be Eocambrian, not Eocene. (Yeats et al. 1984, Butler et al. 1987, Jauné and Lillie 1988, Baker et al. 1988, Pennock et al. 1989, McDougall and Khan 1990).
McDougall, J. W., and Khan, S. H., 1990, Strike-slip faulting in a foreland fold-thrust belt: The Kalabagh Fault and Western Salt Range, Pakistan: Tectonics, v. 9, pp. 1061-1075.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/1990/TC009i005p01061.shtml
— dab - I wonder if Faye was reading Playboy for the articles?— varsity
About this blog
Faye Flam - writer
In pursuit of her stories, writer Faye Flam has weathered storms in Greenland, gotten frost nip at the South Pole, and floated weightless aboard NASA’s zero-g plane. She has a degree in geophysics from the California Institute of Technology and started her writing career with the Economist. She later took on the particle physics and cosmology beat at Science Magazine before coming to the Inquirer in 1995. Her previous science column, “Carnal Knowledge,” ran from 2005 to 2008. Her new column and blog, Planet of the Apes, explores the topic of evolution and runs here and in the Inquirer’s health section each Monday. Email Faye at fflam@phillynews.com.
Reach Planet of the at fflam@phillynews.com.
Planet of the Apes
In pursuit of her stories, writer Faye Flam has weathered storms in Greenland, gotten frost nip at the South Pole, and floated weightless aboard NASA’s zero-g plane. She has a degree in geophysics from the California Institute of Technology and started her writing career with the Economist. She later took on the particle physics and cosmology beat at Science Magazine before coming to the Inquirer in 1995. Her previous science column, “Carnal Knowledge,” ran from 2005 to 2008. Her new column and blog, Planet of the Apes, explores the topic of evolution and runs here and in the Inquirer’s health section each Monday. Email Faye at fflam@phillynews.com.
Reach Planet of the at fflam@phillynews.com.
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