By ALASTAIR THOMPSON - SCOOP INDEPENDENT NEWS
Added: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 00:00:00 UTC

Thanks to alovrin for the link.
Original link

As Richard Dawkins took the stage applause echoed around the cavernous venue which had been upgraded to enable more people to attend the most popular event in this year's Festival of the Arts.

Dawkins was introduced in glowing terms by his interviewer - a teacher (presumably of Science) who did not give his name. The introduction listed Dawkins' many best selling books lavishing praise on several of them.

Dawkins then moved to the podium to deliver a lecture entitled "Gratitude for evolution and the evolution of gratitude." The theme of this address was essentially that "our atheist, scientific, skeptical world view" need not lead to people being "joyless and dull". He concluded that indeed we should be grateful to be alive, and indeed that have probably evolved to "lust" to be grateful (which in part explains the human desire for religion).

In the end he only had sufficient time to deliver the first half of his thesis which was essentially a rapid romp through evolutionary science and philosophy emphasising two central points, that:
- the beginning of life at all in the primeval soup was a remarkable and so far unexplained phenomena - his "gut feeling" is that life is extremely rare in the universe but he does not put a lot of store in "gut feeling"
- secondly, once started evolution is the "fact" that enabled life to progress from bacteria through to human beings and other high level life forms - he emphasised that evolution is "not chance" rather its a highly predictable process driven by natural selection, and in particular freak accidents causing separation of populations.

Within the evolutionary milieu there is a "predictable sameness", Dawkins said. Eyes, ears and large complex brains for example have evolved dozens of times independently. Dawkins even said he had some sympathy with the view that if the evolutionary tape were re-run it would result again with bi-pedal upright creatures with large brains, hands and opposing thumbs. This should not be mistaken however for evidence of a creator - but rather simply that there are better paths that evolution can and does take.

Dawkins then moved onto a discussion of the cleverness of enzymes, protein and DNA, clearly delighting in the detail which he could only briefly touch upon.
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TAGGED: EVOLUTION, RICHARD DAWKINS, SPEECHES