Edge of the Knife continued

The Foolish Either/Or of Evolution

There are few more extreme us-versus-them, either/or issues that the fascinating battle over a scientific theory first proposed more than a century and a half ago.

Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection---“evolution” in the TV commercial version---is pitted against various stories that have in common an “intelligent” (if not Supreme) designer or Creator. That the idea that a Creator (however defined) could have created life forms by means of evolution over time almost never enters the debate (even though the wily Catholic Church once thought this was an elegant solution). This suggests that the debate is about a great deal more than biology.

It is quite often categorized as Science vs. Religion. The rise of science and technology define the modern age, and so do the controversies over their uses and misuses, both real and imagined, and especially their proper domains.

Adherents of particular religious beliefs and members of specific religious organization do engage in these conflicts with science and its representatives. But these particular fights also reveal more general conflicts involving questions of the claims and power of this era's kinds of science.

As is often the case with two opposite and extreme camps, each begins to take on qualities of the other. The religionists set up institutes and fund those who build a case for their beliefs in the language of science, while some scientists proclaim their version of Darwinian evolution as a dogma, even against their colleagues and allies employing good scientific method.

Extremes also lead to more extremes. While some Christian fundamentalists maintain beliefs that go against even commonly accepted knowledge (affirming a particular Biblical interpretation that claims the planet is only a few thousand years old, for example), some scientists are so defensive that they will admit no possibility or mystery or suggestion of transcendence that smacks of “religion,” which would place Einstein, for example, in the camp of delusion.

There is a kind of highly destructive war on science in Bushworld, though its purpose is at least as much to defend certain corporate interests as to support any religious belief, even for political purposes. This has made an already extreme situation more extreme.

In America the imagery of this war of the either/or goes back eighty years to the Scopes trial, where e-vil-ution was demonized as anti-Christian, and opponents of Darwinism were caricatured as ignorant hayseeds and backward idiots. But even then, there was more to the conflict than meets the single-image seeing eye.

History shows that the idea of evolution was already being co-opted by proponents of particular philosophical and political views even before Darwin’s theory was published. “Survival of the fittest” became a justification for the rich oppressing the poor. And that was just the beginning.

Darwin produced what is basically a description of a mechanism for how certain processes work to govern biological change in common plants and animals over time. But others used this kind of inexorable and impersonal machine logic to justify predatory capitalism, imperialism and “might makes right” military conquest in the so-called human realm. By these interpretations, the “dark Satanic mills” of England, the slaughter of Indigenous populations throughout the world, and the march of Hitler across Europe, were all manifestations of evolution.

Speaking of Hitler, 19th and 20th century proponents of eugenics also co-opted the Darwinian mechanism. These theories were used to justify discrimination against a wide variety of ethnic groups (including all that my ancestors belonged to.) Historian Bethany E. Moreton writes:

“The textbook at stake in the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial,’ Civic Biology, calmly pointed out that if the retarded, the insane, the criminal, and the epileptic members of the human family were animals, ‘we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading.’”

So perhaps there is something to the fear that being told your are descended from animals might get you treated like one. The textbook's statement is ironically reminiscent of William Bennett’s recent claim that crime rates would fall if all black babies were aborted, although the biology book’s statement has the virtue of probably being literally true, while Bennett’s statement does not.

In fact, for much of the past 200 years, all change---destruction of the land, of communities and families—was justified as progress, itself a particular interpretation of evolution. Some people objected to this, including some of those backward farmers in the American South.

The point isn’t that anti-evolutionists were right, but that they weren’t all wrong. It was all much more complex than any dramatic either/or.

The world is as sharp as the edge of a knife. The dilemmas we face in the real world are more difficult that what opposing teams shout at each other. Consider the plight of Christian fundamentalist parents who love their children and want them to prosper, and who realize that the basic mechanism of evolution in ordinary plants and animals—proven every day in high school biology labs---is fundamental to the science those children must learn to get the education they need. Or the scientist whose daughter is a drug-addled mess because her school is ruled by another scientist who believes her mechanism needs adjusting, since there is clearly nothing so unscientific as a psyche, let alone a soul.

The knife edge the Haida literally live on is a strip of land between the ferocities of the sea and the dangers of the forest. But both the sea and the forest nourish them, physically and in spirit. They are the source of good and of evil in the Haida's universe, and so they are not just feared or just praised. They are respected.