Oppressed by evolution

What, indeed? But if you are going to classify living things at all, you have to group people and wolves together in some category, since they are both living things. Actually, the classification that Bryan railed against was in place a century before Darwin published his ideas on evolution. It was the pious creationist Carl von Linne, not some atheistic evolutionist, who named the Mammalia and classed Homo sapiens among them, back in 1758. And even then, in the mid-eighteenth century, classifying people as animals was an ancient idea. The Old Testament itself says bluntly that human beings are beasts, and no nobler than any of the others (Eccles. 3:18-21). Yes, of course we are mammals: hairy, warmblooded vertebrates with milk glands and big forebrains, like wolves and hyenas and skunks. What's so awful about that? What else could we possibly be? Insects? Plants? Seraphim?

Most religious antievolutionists recognize that people resemble animals, but they refuse to believe it's a literal family resemblance. They think it insults human dignity to describe people as modified apes. But the Bible says that God made man from the dust of the ground (Gen. 2:7). Why is being a made-over ape more humiliating than being made-over dirt?

Given such patent contradictions, it seems apparent that there must be something else about Darwinian evolution that bothers antievolutionists. And I think we can get some idea of what it is by studying the strange alliance against Darwin that's emerged in recent years between the forces of the religious right and the academic left.

The academic left is a diverse group. It includes all shades of opinion from the palest pink liberals to old-fashioned bright red Marxists. Probably no two of them have the same opinions about everything. But a lot of them have bought into some notions that are deeply hostile to the scientific enterprise in general and the study of evolution in particular. Although these notions are often expressed in a mind-numbing "postmodern" jargon, at bottom they're preny simple. We can sum them up in one sentence: Anybody who claims to have objective knowledge about anything is trying to control and dominate the rest of us.

The postmodern critique of science runs something like this: There are no objective facts. All supposed "facts" are contaminated with theories, and all theories are infested with moral and political doctrines. Because different theories express different perceptions of the world, there's no neutral yardstick for measuring one against another. The choice between competing theories is always a political choice. Therefore, when some guy in a lab coat tells you that such and such is an objective fact--say, that there isn't any firmament, or that people are related to wolves and hyenas--he must have a political agenda up his starched white sleeve.

"Science is politics," writes Robert Young, editor of the journal Science as Culture. "Recent work has made it clear to those with eyes to see that there is no place in science, technology, medicine, or other forms of expertise where you cannot find ideology acting as a constitutive determinant."