Trust Dawkins to toss out middlebrow thinking

Dawkins is one of those personalities whose reputation overshadows his ideas. Which is a pity because if only people committed some time to understanding his treatise and refrain from jumping to the conclusion that he is strictly defending the cause of atheism.

In Climbing Mount Improbable, Dawkins is writing to address an audience of non-biologists. It can be read as an attempt to be more accessible and an open invitation to his critics that are not trained in the field of biology to take his ideas head on.

If you want to go up against him, you better be able to first figure out from where he is coming from. And he lends you a hand by presenting his case clearly and coherently.

With this book, Dawkins is also doing what his hero, Charles Darwin, never managed to do, which is to provide a variety of examples illustrating the possibility of elaborate complexities of nature without the need to appeal to the idea of an intelligent creator.

Cumulative and gradual development left to some degree of randomness is sufficient to explain the wonders that abound in nature.

And here is a useful counter-argument that proponents of evolutionary theory can use: Dawkins astutely picks out one common fallacy among middlebrow thinkers, especially those who like to point out the apparent lack of transitional forms of fossils at the species level.

It basically means that the attack on evolutionary theory being incomplete is because there appears to be gaping holes in the evolutionary tree that do not reveal transitory fossilised remains.

However, this sort of criticism is more a a matter of semantics and categorisation than a weakness of the theory itself.

Consider this other analogy: Children grow into adults in a continuous process. But due to legalities and conventions, the cut-off age that is used to determine adulthood is usually pegged at 18 years of age.

If eligible voters in an election is separated into two categories - eligible voters over 18 and those that don't qualify because they are under 18 years old - this will produce two distinct but somewhat artificial categories of dividing people.

It is clear that such a categorisation will not produce intermediaries i.e. no one can be classified as either NOT a voter or NOT a non-voter.

Likewise, when creationists make "clever" arguments saying that evolutionary theory is fundamentally flawed because there is no species identified as intermediaries, they are attacking the classification system instead of the theory itself.

This is perhaps one of the classic fallacies whereby the map is mistaken for the terrain and people debate passionately (and erroneously) about the map, regardless of how different the terrain appears.

In fact, the transition from Australopithecus to Homo habilis to Homo erectus to "archaic Homo sapiens" to "modern Homo sapiens" is so smoothly gradual that fossil experts are bickering about how to classify particular fossils.

And if there are missing fossils that break up the smooth transition, there is also the possibility that remains were not in a condition that allowed them to be fossilised. This is also another classic fallacy of mistaking absence of evidence for evidence of absence.

Climbing Mount Improbable is an apt metaphor even 12 years after this book was published. This is because advancing the debate of evolution is appearing to be an insurmountable task having it constantly mired in misunderstandings.

And it does not help that arguments made against evolution are as flawed and passionate as ever.