I am so glad I was able to be there yesterday, in the VERY back row as I was. Great experience. Thank you, Richard, for speaking so expressively, because I couldn't really make out your face ;-)

Dawkins celebrates the miracle of life – with or without God

Well done – you’ve discovered an algorithm to use double meanings of religious language in English to make situations involving atheists seem ironic even when they’re not. Now you can base a whole journalism career on it. The media have never had it so easy since atheists started speaking out, have they?

His rationale for having to devote a new book to the subject more than 150 years after Darwin's On the Origin of Species?

1. So, it’s only worth writing something new briefly after the Origin? 2. Don’t you think science needs updating, however good its books are? The Origin is no holy text (not that Christians abstain from writing books about their faith, anyway). 3. Actually, it wasn’t more than 150 at the time. Does this guy think TGSOE was published this week or something?

#Jos Gibbons
As I might agree with first objection the second seems to me a bit ..misplaced.
His point was "Why to write about something we already (150 years) know it is true ?" and then he answers himself with "actually many ppl dont think so", so theres the reason.
He doesnt dismiss other reasons, he was just trying, imho, to asnwer the question I mentioned before.

Re: "Once again! I'm sorry, to take a sledge hammer to so small and fragile a nut."

Professor Dawkins,

Keep swinging that sledge hammer! Eventually, the nut may see that the truth is self-evident.

Great Job!

William

(No relation to date)

Dawkins ranged through his latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth, citing the special place of Australia's marsupials among the compelling evidence for evolution through natural selection over creationism.

Lovely. And when he speaks in Wellington on Wednesday, he can equally cite the special place of New Zealand's flightless birds among the compelling evidence for evolution through natural selection over creationism.

Can we seriously believe that the kiwi, the moa, the kakapo, the takahe, the pukeko and the weka walked from Mt Ararat (beside the kangaroo, the koala, the emu, the platypus, the echidna, the wombat and the bandicoot, before saying a fond farewell at Sydney Harbour), leaving no trace on the way?

Comment #467366 by Shuggy

Can we seriously believe that the kiwi, the moa, the kakapo, the takahe, the pukeko and the weka walked from Mt Ararat ... leaving no trace on the way?

Here's the best creationists can come up with.

Warning: following this link can seriously furrow your brow...

http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/nab/how-did-animals-spread

but then again it concludes:

We must not be downhearted by critics and their frequent accusations against the Bible. We must not be surprised that so many people will believe all sorts of strange things, whatever the logic.

The irony...

Why DID all those penguins take the long waddle south, from the bowels of Noah's ark, to the frosty Antarctic?

To me, this is Richard Dawkins at his best.

The Selfish Gene may have made him famous, and he certainly grabbed hold of the brass ring with The God Delusion, but I believe it is this kind of humorous satirical commentary that will eventually diffuse into religious American heads. Even bible thumpers can't be completely immune to such hilarious broadsides.

Great comic timing and inflection in his delivery, also. Carry on, Professor.

Yeah, Richard is a really good public speaker. I'm amazed at how many authors aren't.

I went with a few friends and while it was nice to hear him speak, I don't think it was particularly brilliant. It didn't seem well targeted at the sort of people who are willing to pay $40 to hear him. It would have been nice to have had something more topical, even perhaps topical and about the country where he was speaking.
For example, in the week before I went to see him I was reading in the Australian newspapers about the new South Australian curriculum which blocked the teaching of creationism in science classes.

So my suggestion for Richard (for what it is worth) is to be a little more off the cuff. A little more informal and to have slightly fresher material.

"After a lively hour, with not a mutter of disagreement from the audience, it was case closed." Yeah Right. I expect we'll see the creationist centres closed down then?

"The irony... "

whats even more ironic is that Ken Ham and Ray Comfort are from OZ and NZ.

Comment #467392 by Philster61 "whats even more ironic is that Ken Ham and Ray Comfort are from OZ and NZ."- Hey, maybe Ray and Ken are marsupials? Ken is definitly hairy enough. Imagine his kin folk treking across South East Asia to get to....um wait minute- maybe they went the other way around the world...I guess I'll ask a creationist if they have information on this. They probably do- they're always very friendly people.

I've always had a problem with the way the Australian snails got to the Ark in time and back again. All those soil bacteria must have had a bit of a problem too.

As for that Australian toad that lives most of its life under the desert and only surfaces when it has rained, well now that IS a mystery. It would surely have had to start hopping off to the Ark before the rain started to get there in time?

Richard, the nut that needs smashing here in the US is huge indeed. Please bring that sledgehammer to my neighborhood!

6. Comment #467373 by Nastika on March 8, 2010 at 10:23 am

Comment #467366 by Shuggy

Can we seriously believe that the kiwi, the moa, the kakapo, the takahe, the pukeko and the weka walked from Mt Ararat ... leaving no trace on the way?

Here's the best creationists can come up with.

Warning: following this link can seriously furrow your brow...

http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/nab/how-did-animals-spread

Thanks, Nastika. I L'dOL at the way he used the rarity of fossilisation to explain the paucity of fossils on the way, when they're constantly berating us about the "missing links".
I particularly liked:

The principal error of this view is that it starts from supposed scientific anomalies, such as the fossil record, rather than from Scripture.

Anomalies?

It's simple people: Australia is the marsupial Promise Land, and they got there by parting the Pacific Ocean.

Thanks Richard for bringing your kind of sledge hammer to the nut(s)(jobs)

You bring a sense of hope that maybe the truth will overwhelm the fantasy that so controls many aspects of the human race.

It is very important to me that my 18 month old daughter does not have to listen to the dribble dished out by the deluded religious sector while being educated in school.

So keep up the good fight.

And what did the Koala's eat on their trek to Australia...Eucalyptus is rather native to Australia.

Nice talk, but the google ad next to the article caught my attention:

Darwin's Death Knell
Radical New Theory of Evolution Overturns 150 Years of Dogma
www-HyperEvolution.com

Don't bother clicking though - it's bollocks.

Saw a fellow passenger reading TGSOE in the train in Sydney. I had Mount improbable in my hand. A good conversation ensued.

Noah's Ark is an easy one to tackle from the perspective of 'How big would the Ark have to be to house and maintain 2 of each species to survive for 40 days?'
This Ark would have had to have had not only space for 2 of everything (tens of thousands of species) but also the food for 40 days. Now unless the carnivores turn vegan and the elephants don't eat much there is a huge amount of space required just for food. This Ark is begining to be the size of a aircraft carrier to provide the space.
Ok that's the size dealt with. Now lets deal with construction. An Ark the size of an aircraft carrier would have to be made of wood as it is one of the common ship building materials of the time. The amount of wood required would have been enormous - a whole forest around 5 sq/kms in size I would be guessing if not more. This wood also needed to be felled and milled. The ark was probably designed and built in the area of Palestine/Israel which does not appear to have many forests; so the suitable wood would have to be transported to the construction site from possibly hundreds of kms away. Of course the Ark was built by one man - Noah. So to build an Ark the size of an aircraft carrier made almost entirely from wood from by one man with simple tools and construction techniques - 5 lifetimes would not have been enough. It does not really add up as a plausible story let alone the evolutionary explaination that beautifully nails the lid closed on this myth.
Now surely the religious archaeologists should easily find the remains of a wooden ship the size of an aircraft carrier somewhere on the slopes of Mt Ararat - it shouldn't be too hard to spot being that big!

Comment #467689 by Eyerish:

This Ark is begining to be the size of a aircraft carrier to provide the space.

You mean bigger than the Wyoming, a ship that used to flex in heavy seas and had to be constantly pumped - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyoming_(schooner)

21. Comment #467689 by Eyerish

Noah's Ark might be one of those ideas that are so ridiculous, you actually give more credence to it by taking it seriously enough to poke holes in it.

Anyone who thinks that tens or hundreds of thousands of species of animals (including the dinosaurs) were fed and cared for on a great big boat for six months will not be persuaded by anything rational. It's inconceivable to me that a non-retarded, literate adult who attempted to honestly think through the implications of the Noah's Ark story would not reject it within about 3 minutes. So clearly, any adult who incorporates this myth into their explanation of natural history has arrived at that place by telling reason and rationality to take a permanent hike. However competent they might be in other aspects of their lives, on this subject you might as well be speaking to a small child.

And speaking of irrational adherence to biblical myth, what about the Tower of Babel? Do linguists ever get any shit for not considering the alterative theory of the origin of languages?

Noah's Ark is "alive & well" in Branson Mizzurah:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ub04xcEKwCY

24. Comment #468025 by bluebird on March 10, 2010 at 10:59 am

Co-starring Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum as the mated pair of Dodo birds.

From the AiG article, linked above:

One ought likewise to ask why it is that, despite the fact that millions of bison used to roam the prairies of North America, hardly any bison fossils are found there.

Hmm... Try typing "bison fossil" into Google Scholar. Ignorant or lying?

I was wondering if the full version with Grayling and Dawkins is available anywhere? I was under the impression that it would be available on smh.com

- "So, Grayling at 12 noon, Dawkins at 2pm, both speaking at Sydney Opera House this Sunday, available live here: http://bit.ly/dawkinssoh .

And if you can't watch either, don't worry. The recorded version of both addresses will be posted on smh.com.au next week."

Does anybody know something I don't? (pertaining to the video obviously - otherwise I would be a bit of a big-head!)

Thanks.