Richard Dawkins And The 11 Second Pause

What Happened During The Filming Of
"From A Frog To A Prince"?

By Ross Olson

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Professor Richard Dawkins of Oxford University is a man of letters, and a man of words. He is rarely at a loss for words, especially when defending his favorite topic -- evolution -- or lambasting his traditional opponents -- creationists.

Therefore, it is indeed noteworthy if such an eloquent wit should appear to be speechless when asked a question right up his alley, that is: "Professor Dawkins, can you give an example of a genetic mutation or an evolutionary process which can be seen to increase the information in the genome?" Yet he appears, on the videotape "From a Frog To A Prince," to be struggling for words after being asked that very question. As he himself wrote when responding to the tape, it is inconceivable that he could not answer it and the phenomenon requires another explanation.

All agree that there was indeed something else going on. The only question is what.

Initially, Barry Williams of the Australian Skeptics hinted at dark plots involving sophisticated digital alteration of the tape. He focused on the change of interviewer's voice and the physical setting from the time of taping to the final tape. Later, he admitted that the question was indeed asked and that the response was indeed to that question.

Professor Dawkins himself admitted that the question was asked, just not by the person who appeared on the tape, and that the pause indeed followed. But he states that he was upset because it suddenly became obvious to him that the question was being asked by a creationist and he had been under the impression that he was being interviewed by impartial interrogators. His flustered appearance was a result of the internal conflict he felt between British hospitality and the intense desire to "throw the bums out."

Yes, it is the kind of question that only a creationist would ask. Evolutionists will try very hard to avoid asking it and would rather speak in glowing generalities. But does that mean that it is not important? On the contrary, it proves that it is a question that must be answered by evolutionists. And Dawkins agrees.

He later wrote a treatise explaining that mutations actually decrease information while natural selection increases it. Since this is not an intuitively obvious concept, it may have been that he did not think the company assembled for the interview were capable of following such esoteric cerebration (or perhaps he was not sure he could keep a straight face while saying it on camera.)

The way it works is this. Information can be defined as whatever decreases choices. For example, you hear that a friend has had a baby, but do not know the gender. When you hear, "It's a girl," you no longer have two choices to consider and thus have received information. Mutations, by offering more choices, decrease information. There is the old gene and the new gene, two choices. But when the one is selected, we are back down to one choice -- therefore information has been added.

Aside from the fact that, in this example, we only get back to the same amount of "information" we started with (one gene), there seems to be something wrong with the definition. It is not capable of producing the kind of information needed to go from no genes in the pre-biotic soup, through the supposedly few genes of the simplest living thing, to the billions of genes in the present biosphere.

It also seems that something devious has been done to the definition of information. It is similar to the statement that ABCABCABCABCABC has less information than CAABABCCBABCBAC, because it takes more information to describe it. In the former, it can be stated as "ABC x5" but in the latter, each position must be described. This is true, but not helpful for evolution, because that rather random sequence of letters, unless it is code, is not useful information. In other words, you don't write the Encyclopedia Britannica that way.

After viewing the video and reading interactions about the controversy, I wrote Dr. Dawkins and was astounded to get a rapid reply. But because the reply did not answer the most important question, I wrote again, after which there has been a more than two year pause. Thus it appears that there will be no more responses.

Perhaps the long interval between the events and Dr. Dawkins' attempted recollection of them has something to do with the discrepancies. Regardless, the original question still remains unanswered, for nowhere does he give a sensible answer to the question, "Professor Dawkins, can you give an example of a genetic mutation or an evolutionary process which can be seen to increase the information in the genome?"

If that does not work, try clicking HERE

For the whole uncut 19 seconds, click HERE

Video clip used by permission of Answers in Genesis. Unauthorized Use Prohibited. (The full video is available from AiG Website www.answersingenesis.org) See their bookstore page by clicking HERE.

If you wish to interact with this issue, e-mail to ross{at}rossolson.org and indicate if we may post your mail on the TCCSA Website.

Perhaps the long interval between the events and Dr. Dawkins' attempted recollection of them has something to do with the discrepancies. Regardless, the original question still remains unanswered, for nowhere does he give a sensible answer to the question, "Professor Dawkins, can you give an example of a genetic mutation or an evolutionary process which can be seen to increase the information in the genome?"