Darwin Day
Make like Pearl Jam & do the Evolution
When I was attending college in London, Ontario a few years ago, I was reading Roger Fouts’ exploration of the capacity of chimpanzees, both in the wild and in captivity, to learn language from humans, and their ability to create their own language. The cover portrayed a chimp in a Mr. Rogers-like sweater, an image which made a man sitting across from me on the bus extremely irate: “That cover! It’s bullshit! I never came from no monkey”. Foolishly, I allowed myself to get sucked into an impromptu debate, a difficult challenge to be sure. After all, how do you defend evolution from one its deniers, especially when their own knuckles seem to be a little closer to the ground? Surely they could see that through their own sloped brow!
This coming Feb 12, I invite you all to celebrate Darwin Day, the 199th birthday of our favourite hirsute naturalist, Charles Darwin. From to the Secular Students Alliance:
There is an organized movement against the teaching of biological evolution through natural selection. Those opposing evolution have spread a tremendous amount of misinformation. Also, efforts to reduce the teaching of evolution have left many people without a quality science education….We seek to remind ourselves and our communities how important responsible scientific inquiry and education is to both our understanding of the world and our well being.
Considering the multitudinous incarnations of evolutionary theory, it is quite remarkable just how much Darwin got right the first time. Notions such as gradualism and natural selection were hotly contested at the time, but later discoveries of genetics, DNA, and most recently, the mapping of the human genome, perfectly coincided with the predictions laid out by Darwin and, owing to the axiom that science is predictable and repeatable, the theory of evolution has, for all intents and purposes, transcended the status of theory, and became law.
There is a widespread misconception among most that evolution is still trapped in the theory stage: that its problems (to be sure, there are problems), are so damning that scientists are reluctant to accept it as law. This is untrue, and is a typical perception of those unfamiliar with the scientific process, scientific community, or with scientific discoveries. Evolution has survived 150 years of the rigors and vigors of the scientific peer review process, and it has held up to the most difficult scrutiny (DNA), and the most inane (religious, spiritual). Scientists no longer debate evolution. Scientists do not believe in evolution. They accept it. Like man-made global warming, the science has confirmed it, and the scientists must now convince the rest of us that it’s legit. But we don’t seem to want to listen.
Unfortunately for the pursuit of science, the socio-political implications of Darwin’s findings quickly outpaced the work itself. Darwin, in the tradition of Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler, committed that most horrendous of crimes that a scientist can commit: suggesting that humans are not special. Any factual revelation that puts humanity in its proper context (that is, an insignificant one) has been met with hostility, excommunication, and even threats of immolation. Arguably, Darwin’s findings were of greater significance and insult: to suggest that humans had any biological analog in the animal kingdom, and may even be PART of that kingdom, was a de facto conclusion that left little room for an interventionist, personal God (a room already made smaller by Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler and Newton).
I wrote a paper several years ago describing the evolution of first nations cultures after European contact, and was I lambasted as being racist, a reaction that reflected not a reactionary culture, but the commonplace Lamarckian mistake that evolution is about improvement (a notion he recanted and apologized for late in life). Let’s be certain: Evolution says nothing about how life began, or how life advances, but instead focuses on how species adapt to their environment. Furthermore, I caution anti-evolution activists from invoking eugenics and Hitler when admonishing evolution. It is a teleological mistake, a non-sequitur, ad hominem attack, and slippery slope argument: four fatal logical fallacies that reflect the religious community’s ignorance and venom when discussing the outrageous notion that humanity might not be so special as the ancient texts written by people with no little-to-no knowledge of biology and astronomy might want us to believe. There is also the mistake of inconsistency, as countless religious texts and leaders for millennia have taught about the hierarchy of life and even the God-given superiority of one race over another.
This February 12 (also the birthday of the greatest American hero after Batman, Abraham Lincoln), take a moment to reflect on the sheer magnitude of the diversity of life, and of the extremely humble beginnings of man. It was a long, arduous, disease-ridden process, full of birth defects, crippling mutations, extinctions and crap-throwing (the latter of which can still be seen at some keggers). Over hundreds of thousands of years, humans eventually came along and learned how to sharpen a stick, make a fire, build a hut, and go to the moon. It was not a snake in a tree talking to two naked people who didn’t have belly buttons. So to that man sitting on the bus yelling at me that he “didn’t come from no monkey”, I quote the founder of modern brain surgery, Paul Broca: “I would rather be a transformed ape than a degenerate son of Adam”.