How Did Richard Dawkins Refute Creationism?

Yue Fu
Prof. John A. Dern
Mosaic: Humanities Seminar 852
January 30, 2015
Gradualism—the Principle Flows Through the River of Time
Although the Darwinian evolution theory came out 150 years ago when it was first introduced in On the Origin of Species in 1859, nowadays there are still many people who firmly believe in the creationism, even some who are well educated. In chapter three of River Out of Eden Richard Dawkins brings out this situation and refutes creationism by citing scientific experiments, and finally he points out that gradualism is a principle of the evolution nature world, one that becomes indispensable when one is trying to explain complex phenomena.
At the beginning of chapter three, Dawkins quote a letter from an American
Although he does not order the objects by intelligence, the examples show a strong recursive relationship among them. Humans are the cleverest among birds, fish and swaps, while birds have bigger brains than fish and fish have bigger brains and better eyesight than swaps. Initially, Dawkins makes a very simple and real-life example: “the stuntman’s resemblance to the star is usually extremely superficial, but in the fleeting action shot it is enough to fool an audience” (Dawkins 62). Despite the fact that humans have the most developed brains among all the tellurians and the best eyesight among vertebrates, we cannot say that we are hard to be fooled. In fact, we are much easier to be fooled than we imagine. This example should be considered as a foreshadowing before Dawkins officially refutes the minister’s statement by using scientific experiments which makes the audiences or the opponents realize that we should put ourselves in the object’s position instead of using our own judgment arbitrarily. Dawkins further explains his reason by an example of insects: “It is known that insect eyes see the world in a completely different way from our eyes. The great Austrian zoologist Karl von Frisch discovered as a young man that they are blind to red light but they can see—and see as its own distinct hue—ultraviolet light, to which we are blind” (Dawkins
Mash pointed out that black-headed gulls would consider a black wooden model as a real gulls, yet it is only a wooden rod without any body, legs, wings or tail. Dawkins’s teacher, Tinbergen found out that stickleback fish mistakenly thought a red mail van and a silvery dummy were their same species! By citing these two experiments, Dawkins gives adequate evidence to prove that limited intelligence and eyesight suggest that organisms do not have to be “perfect” to work and that they can be easily fooled. Instead, most of the animals judge whether an object is their same kind by only one or few characteristics.
After offering these experiments, Dawkins summarized that:“The reason eyes and wasp-pollinated orchids impress us so is that they are improbable by luck are odds too great to be borne in the real world. Gradual evolution by small steps, each step being lucky but not too lucky, is the solution to the riddle” (Dawkins 83-84). This summery reflects the relationship between the experiments and gradualism where profound change is the cumulative product of slow but continuous