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Oppressed by evolution

Discover, March, 1998 by Matt Cartmill

As far as we can tell, all of earth's living things are descended from a distant common ancestor that lived more than 3 billion years ago. This is an important discovery, but it's not exactly news. Biologists started putting forward the idea of evolution back in the 1700s, and thanks to Darwin's unifying theory of natural selection, it's been the accepted wisdom in biology for more than a hundred years. So you might think tbat by now everyone would have gotten used to the idea that we are blood kin to all other organisms, and closer kin to great apes than to spiders. On the face of it, the idea makes a certain amount of plain common sense. We all know that we share more features with apes than we do with spiders or snails or cypress trees. The theory of evolution simply reads those shared features as family resemblances. It doesn't deny that people are unique in important ways. Our kinship with apes doesn't mean we're only apes under the skin, any more than the kinship of cats with dogs means that your cat is repressing a secret urge to bark and bury bones.

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Yet many people don't accept the idea of evolution, and even feel dQwnright threatened by it. Conserva tive Christians, in particular, have opposed it; to them, science ran off track in 1859 when Darwin's Origin of Species first hit the bookstores. Over the decades, we biologiss have become accustomed to this opposition, but in recent years there has been a change in the antievolution camp. Now we find ourselves defending Darwin against attacks not only from the religious right but from the academic left as well.

In the United States the religious opposition to Darwin is chiefly made up of evangelical Protestants. Some of them are smart, savvy, angry, and well organized, and they have been working here for almost a hundred years to stop biologists from telling people about the history of life. In the early part of this century they persuaded the legislatures of several states to pass laws against teaching evolution. When the courts threw out those laws, the antievolutionists tried a different strategy: fighting for laws giving equal classroom time to "creation science"--that is, Biblebased biology. That didn't work, either. Now they're trying to compel teachers to present evolution as a mere theory rather than a fact. So far they haven't succeeded, but they're still working at it.

It seems clear that these religious antievolutionists aren't going to go away in the foreseeable future; biologists will have to fight them for another century or two to keep them from outlawing Darwin. But if we are to succeed, I think we'll need to give serious thought to our opponents' motives. I suspect they are deeper and subtler than most scientists like to think--or than most crusaders against evolution themselves believe.

One reason I believe this is that the motives publicly claimed by Christian antievolutionists don't make sense. Many will tell you that the evolution issue is a religious struggle between a godless scientific establishment and so-called creationists--that is, themselves. But a lot of evolutionary biologists are creationists, too--devout Christians, Jews, and Muslims, who believe in an eternal God who created the world. They just don't see any reason to think that he created it as recently as 4000 B.C.

Many opponents of the idea of evolution say they reject it because it contradicts the Bible. They claim to believe that every word in the Bible is literally true. But no one really believes that. We all know that when, in John 7:38, Jesus said, "He that believeth on me . . . out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water," he didn't mean it literally. It's a figure of speech. Practically every book of the Bible contains some such passages, which have to be read as either figures of speech or errors of fact. Consider Biblical astronomy. The Old Testament depicts the "firmament" as a strong dome or tent spread out above the Earth. It has the sun, moon, and stars set in it--and water up above it, and windows in it to let the water out when it rains (see Gen. 1:6-8, 1:14-17, 7:11, 8:2; Job 37:18; Ps. 104:2; Isa. 24:18; and Mal. 3:10). This is a lovely picture. If you read it as poetry, it's gorgeous. But taken literally, it's just plain wrong. There isn't any firmament or any water above the firmament, and the sun, moon, and stars aren't attached to anything. And if we can all agree that there isn't any firmament, then we can all agree that the literal truth of the Bible can't be the real issue here.

Some religious people say they reject the idea of evolution because it lowers human beings to the level of the beasts and blinds us to the nobility of man. In his closing speech for the prosecution in the 1925 Scopes monkey trial, William Jennings Bryan pointed angrily to a high-school textbook that classed Homo sapiens as a mammal. "No circle is reserved for man alone," Bryan protested. "He is, according to the diagram, shut up in the lime circle entitled `Mammals,' with thirty-four hundred and ninety-nine other species of mammals.... What shall we say of the intelligence, not to say religion, of those who are so particular to distinguish between fishes and reptiles and birds, but put a man with an immortal soul in the same circle with the wolf, the hyena, and the skunk? What must be the impression made upon children by such a degradation of man?"

Oppressed by evolution

Discover, March, 1998 by Matt Cartmill

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