Those who deny evolution, almost always for religious reasons, have no idea how central to biology evolution is. Several of my West Point classmates years after graduate remain enamored of creationism. Since creationism and Tea Party affiliation are highly correlated, maybe in this area we can agree: for some of us the quarter-million-dollar West Point educational tab does represent government waste!
The fallacy of believing literally in a 7,000-year-old planet devoid of evolution is not simply at odds with what carbon-dating, sediment deposits, the fossil record, and our DNA tell us - it is absolutely irreconcilable.
As Herbert Spencer put it best, "Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution, as not adequately supported by facts, seem quite to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all." [1] In other words, there are not two competing theories. There is a comprehensive central theory of evolution supported by a wealth of data, proven in real time (asking anyone who deals with microbial resistance to antibiotics or dog breeding for verification). Juxtaposed against this theory is a fundamentalist minority offended that 99% of their DNA is identical to that of chimpanzees. They can speculate about whether the sun was really created on Day 4 but cannot chant away a far more compelling narrative told by their own genetic code, a code the authors of the bible never dreamed we would be able to read.
At any rate, given the behavior of our species as compared to, dogs, let's say, why should kinship with animals so offend us? If anything, it is the dog who should be offended!
Religious fundamentalists lost the early battles against evolution, which they thought they could win simply by stating evolution was counterintuitive (chimpanzees are clearly not human, end of story) or trumped by scripture (Genesis is as silent on evolution as it is on DNA, nucleotides, proteins, or amino acids). Their fear is understandable if they insist on telling their children the Bible is inerrant and should be believed literally. If their secular biology teacher exposed their children to evolution, it could risk making the biblical narrative seem at best an absurd fairy tale, at worst an outright fabrication.
But our DNA does not seem to care all that much about what people encoded with that DNA scribbled on parchment a relatively trivial (in geological time) couple thousand years ago. Nor does it much care how people encoded with that DNA feel about reconciling truth and Genesis. DNA like so much in our universe simply is regardless of how we might feel about it. In fact, there is no scientific phenomenon I can think whose existence is altered by how we feel about it.
Evolution does what any scientific theory is supposed to: it explains and it predicts. Modern fundamentalists have learned that sneering at such a theory wins few converts. Appeals to scriptural authority have been no more successful, especially since neither the authority nor the interpretation of those ancient texts is universal (even among religiously devout). So to win a scientific battle, religious fundamentalists had to don religious garb, however badly it fit.
We no longer ban outright the teaching of evolution, although we did until at least 1925 (John Scopes, the high school biology teacher of the famous 1925 case, was convicted, after all).
So to evade charges of censorship, fundamentalists created creationism and its in-bred offshoot, intelligent design. Creationism allows fundamentalists to distract us from the fact that they are imposing their religious beliefs on our children.
Why, it isn't a religious belief at all. It's a scientific theory, no more or less valid than evolution. Why not let our children be exposed to each and let them decide?
Speaking the language of science, reasonableness, and consumerism cannot hide the fact that every minute wasted on creationism is a minute stolen from understanding biological science. Put bluntly, creationism is not a viable competing counter-theory to evolution. It is a visceral protest disguised as a science.
100% of those who advance intelligent design are fundamentalists, the vast majority Christians. In contrast, most Christians see no contrast between their faith and science - only fundamentalists seem intent on believing that god wants us to ignore the story the universe is telling us.
Did you know there is a Christian fundamentalist group that even sponsors trips down the Grand Canyon to prove the verity of Genesis (which mentions neither America nor the Grand Canyon much less the hundreds of millions of years of geological time whose story the rocks there tell, a far more compelling and believable story than the childishly inaccurate fable some want us to take literally)? (Which version of Genesis I'm not sure, but perhaps different groups get to choose from Genesis I or II.)
Stephen Jay Gould, who has been in a running battle with fundamentalists all his life, reminds us that "evolution is as well documented as any phenomenon in science, as strongly as the earth revolves around the sun rather than vice versa. In this sense, we can call evolution a 'fact'. (Science does not deal in certainty, so "fact" can only mean a proposition affirmed to such a high degree in the perverse to withhold one's provisional assent.)"[2]
Sigmund Freud, a man I usually don't quote too much because some of his followers have created a pseudo-religious cult of personality around him with all the same reinforcing circular beliefs of any religion, even weighed in on why we resist accepting the truth our genes tell us:
"Humanity has over the course of time had to endure from the hand of science two great outrages upon its naive self-love. The first was when it realized that our earth was not the center of the universe, but only a speck in a world system of a magnitude hardly conceivable... The second was when biological research robbed man of his particular privilege of having been specially created and relegated him to descent from the animal world."
But Mark Twain put it best when he pointed out how ludicrous and self-centered it is to assume that a planet that existed for so long before our species' arrival was created only for that species: "Man has been here 32,000 years. That it took 100 million years to prepare the world for him his proof that that is what it was done for. I suppose it is, I dunno. If the Eiffel Tower were now representing the world's age, the skin of paint on the pinnacle knob at its summit would represent man's share of that age; and anybody would perceive that that skin was what the tower was built for. I reckon they would, I dunno."
Twain's numbers reflected the best guesses of the time, but of course since then, the depth of geological time has been extended dramatically, making his point even stronger. The Earth is probably about 4.6 billion years old and hominids - bipedal primates - have been on it for perhaps 4 million years. Our species maybe as young as a few hundred thousand years, depending on how you count, but even using 4 million, that represents about a tenth of a percentage of the total existence of the planet.
Bill Bryson uses an excellent analogy to illustrate this. If you spread your arms to represent the span of the Earth from left to right, visible life (non-microscopic life) didn't appear until your right wrist (the Cambrian Era) and hominids didn't appear until the very tip of your rightmost middle finger (the difference in lengths of your fingers is greater by many magnitudes than the total time of human existence). All of human history could be erased by simply scraping your outermost fingernail.
It could be our bodies were created for the benefit of the outermost cuticle of the fingernail on one hand. But as Twain would say, "I dunno."
Endnotes
[1] as quoted in Scientific American, March 2005)
[2] - Stephen Jay Gould, Time magazine, 8/23/99.
For a summary of excerpts and articles on evolution I have put together, visit http://docs.google.com/View?id=dfdcpm87_506wrb6xghm.
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