>
>Frankly, I think everyone needs to feel more free to write authors to
>correct errors - there are plenty of them out there. If you feel Dawkins
>did something wrong or misused something in his book, write him (and if
>you have a way to publish, you're more than welcome). Doing that is
>more than just complaining about it on the internet.
>
Funny you should mention this as I have recently found a couple of
horrible errors in Dawkins recent book <River out of Eden>. I have
my doubts as to whether writing Dawkins would do any good as the
errors are so blatant I'm fairly confident they were intentional.
First there is a disgusting out of context quotation of John
Polkinghorne:
Thus the creationist's question--" What is the use of half
an eye?"--is a lightweight question, a doddle to answer.
Half an eye is just 1 percent better than 49 percent of
an eye, which is already better than 48 percent, and the
difference is significant. A more ponderous show of weight
seems to lie behind the inevitable supplementary:
"Speaking as a physicist,[*] I cannot believe that there
has been enough time for an organ as complicated as the
eye to have evolved from nothing. Do you really think there
has been enough time?" Both questions stem from the Argument
from Personal Incredulity. Audiences nevertheless appreciate
an answer, and I have usually fallen hack on the sheer
magnitude of geological time. If one pace represents one
century, the whole of Anno Domini time is telescoped into
a cricket pitch. To reach the origin of multi-cellular
animals on the same scale, you'd have to slog all the way
from New York to San Francisco.
The [*] leads one to the following footnote:
[*] I hope this does not give offense. In support of my point,
I cite the following from <Science and Christian Belief>, by
a distinguished physicist, the Reverend John Polkinghorne
(1994, p. 16): "Someone like Richard Dawkins can present
persuasive pictures of how the sifting and accumulation of
small differences can produce large-scale developments, but,
instinctively, a physical scientist would like to see an
estimate, however rough, of how many steps would take us
from a slightly light-sensitive cell to a fully formed
insect eye, and of approximately the number of generations
required for the necessary mutations to occur."
-- Richard Dawkins (1995). <River Out of Eden: A Darwinian
View of Life>, BasicBooks, pp. 77-78.
A relatively minor point is that there is no Argument from
Personal Incredulity in Polkinghorne's statement. Nowhere
does he say anything like "I cannot believe that there has
been enough time for an organ as complicated as the eye to have
evolved from nothing. Do you really think there has been enough
time?" Also, as most on the reflector are probably aware,
Polkinghorne is an evolutionist; he *does* believe that there
has been sufficient time for the eye to have evolved from nothing.
Things get even worse when we look at Polkinghorne's statement
in context. Actually, it took me awhile to track down the context
since Dawkins got the attribution wrong [he did at least get the
year and page number correct :-)]. Here's the context:
Anyone expressing reservations about the total adequacy of
the neo-Darwinian account of evolutionary history is apt to
be looked at askance, as if he were a crypto-creationist
seeking a gap into which to insert a pseudo-deity. Yet one
can accept the insights of natural selection and still feel
that one has not heard the full story. There are two major
problems. One is the question of timescale. Three or four
billion years may seem a pretty long time for the coming
to be of life and the formation of its evolved complexity,
but incredibly intricate developments have to be fitted
into that period. Someone like Richard Dawkins can present
persuasive pictures of how the sifting and accumulation of
small differences can produce large-scale developments,
but, instinctively, a physical scientist would like to see
an estimate, however rough, of how many small steps take
us from a slightly light-sensitive cell to a fully formed
insect eye, and of approximately the number of generations
required for the necessary mutations to occur. One is only
looking for an order of magnitude answer, comparable in
crudity to the back-of-the-envelope calculations of early
cosmologists, but our biological friends tell us, without
any apparent anxiety, that it just can't be done. So much
of evolutionary argument seems to be that , "it's happened
and so it must have happened this way".
The second difficulty is more fundamental. Why do things get
more complex with time? Why do multicellular plants and
animals emerge when single cellular organisms seem to cope
with the environment satisfactorily? There is a direction
of increasing complexity apparent in nature. Paul Davies
has called this progressive tendency 'the optimistic arrow'
of time, in contrast to the pessimistic arrow of the second
law of thermodynamics, which entails increasing entropy in
closed systems. Our recognition that biological entities
are open systems, exporting entropy into the environment,
and the insights gained from the study of the thermodynamics
of systems far from equilibrium, mean that we understand why
there is not a contradiction between these two arrows of
time, but that by itself does not explain the existence of
the optimistic arrow. The theoretical biologist John Maynard
Smith has admitted that "there is nothing in neo-Darwinism
which enables us to predict a long-term increase in complexity.
-- John Polkinghorne (1994). <Faith of a Physicist: Reflections
of a Bottom-Up Thinker>, The Gifford Lectures for 1993-1994,
Princeton University Press, p. 16-17.
The second blatant error has to do with Dawkins summary of the
following paper:
Dan-E. Nilsson and Susanne Pelger, "A pessimistic estimate
of the time required for an eye to evolve," Proc. R. Soc.
Lond. B, 256:53-58, 1994.