Correcting Richard Dawkins on Evolution!

Dr. Craig responds to a diagram on evolutionary change from one of Richard Dawkins' books.

INTERVIEWER: My understanding of evolution is that populations evolve, not individuals. Richard Dawkins has a nice little picture of this in one of his books about science, where he imagines a long picture of, say, rabbits, and every rabbit looks basically the same as its parent rabbit. And you follow along the line, and everyone looks very similar to the one before it, but if you look, say, a million years apart, they look quite different because these changes accumulate over time. But what it sounds like here is it seems you are saying there's actually quite a radical or a significant change between the parents of Adam and Eve and Adam and Eve themselves. And, as you said earlier, to their siblings. So is this some sort of mega-evolution? Or is it like a miraculous intervention?

DR. CRAIG: I said it may well have been miraculous, yes, but remember I talked about the two models: the cultural model and the mutational model. Ian Tattersall of the American Museum of Natural History offers a mutational model of the origin of humanity where there is a dramatic genetic mutation in the regulatory system that has then these huge results in their brain and central nervous system. So this could happen. Now, what's important to see, I think, is that there's a real fallacy in the reasoning of Dawkins here, and this is the same critique that Schaffner and Coyne also make. My model is perfectly consistent with saying that there is this long evolutionary climb toward humanity and then beyond – to Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. But what I am saying is that there is a threshold which is crossed somewhere in that process, and that is because evolutionary change is not continuous. It is continual – it goes on –  but it's not continuous in the sense in which a geometrical line is continuous, namely between any two points there's always another point so no point has an immediate successor. What's striking about evolution is that the change is discrete, not continuous. That's the fallacy of the rabbit diagram! Between any two rabbits there is not another rabbit! There are rabbits that are immediate successors of each other or predecessors, and therefore given discrete evolutionary changes, there's no reason to think that one of these forms is the first one across the threshold and that prior to that it was sub-human. I was talking to Jeff Schloss, who is an evolutionary biologist committed to the theory of evolution though a Christian, and as we spoke he said to me, “I don't see how there could not have been a first human being! At some point in the past there were zero human beings, and then later there were some, and given that evolutionary change is discrete, I frankly don't understand how there could not be a first human being!” So I think this critique by Schaffner and Coyne is invalid.

INTERVIEWER: That's really interesting. This is one where I struggle, like I would probably class myself an evolutionary creationist, or somewhere around there, and this is the struggle not just for humans but the evolution of any organism. Is what you're kind of referring to there similar to punctuated equilibrium – the idea of rapid spurts of evolution? Or is what you're saying a bit different to that?

DR. CRAIG: It doesn't need to be that. This is a point that Tattersall makes in the book where I quote him. He says, “I'm not saying that you have to be a 19th century saltationist,” that is to say, that evolution proceeds by fits and jumps. As long as the change is discrete, there can be someone who is the first one across that threshold that is the difference between non-human and human. And it could come about because of something like a regulatory mutation that produces this change.