Evolutionary Politics

Part One

(I haven't posted in quite a while, so I decided to go ahead and post the rough draft of this essay in the hopes it would draw some comment -- it is till underway ....)



George W. Bush does not believe in evolution.

At least, during the 2003 campaign he asserted that "the jury is still out": In October of 1999 a personal friend of Bush's told New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof:

Characteristically, he does not believe in evolution--he says the jury is still out--but he does not actively disbelieve in it either; as a friend puts it, "he doesn't really care about that kind of thing."

In the face of all that has happened in the last few years -- a stolen election, the squandering of our budget surplus into record deficits, the gutting of environmental policies, secret energy policy meetings, 9-11, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, broken relationships with our oldest allies, Israeli/Palestenian relations spiraling out of control, beheadings, suicide bombers, the collapse of Enron, the hostile takeover of our foreign policy by Halliburton, the GOP's relentless subversion of the democratic process from California to the UN, lies and evasions too numerous to count, the furor over Gay marriage, and a deliberate attack on civil rights -- in the face of these things, a man's opinion on the question of evolution doesn't seem so important. And certainly, it is a personal matter, right? Not the kind of thing that should be a public issue? After all, none of the other candidates were willing to make a definitive statement either. Even Al Gore would only say that the decision on teaching evolution and/or creationism should be left up to the local schoolboards.

And if a local schoolboard decides to teach that the earth is flat, should that be their decision too?

The late Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote in a 1999 Time article:

Evolution is as well documented as any phenomenon in science, as strongly as the earth's revolution 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 that it would be perverse to withhold one's provisional assent.)

Even Pope John Paul II, certainly not to be mistaken for a liberal or progressive thinker, decided some years ago that the Catholic Church would not oppose the idea of evolution.

Creationists and other critics of evolution are always quick to pick up on conflicts between scientists, difference in the details of evolutionary diagrams, or on the role played by catastrophes, random mutations, and other contributing factors -- but differing about exactly how something happens is not the same as disputing that it happens. Newton identified gravity and showed it's properties indisuputably a long time ago -- we are still trying to define exactly what gravity is and how it works. Does that make Newton (or Einstein after him) wrong? Of course not.

Gould is right. Evolution is as much a proven fact as anything can be short of divine revelation. The amount of accumulated evidence is overwhelming: drawing from molecular biology, the fossil record, geology, computer sciences, psychology -- if we had nothing else than the sheer explanatory power that an evolutionary model unleashes for sovling the problems of biology, psychology, medicine, cognitive science, and on and on, the verdict would be inescapable. And Creationist attempts to explain away this evidence, to find some story-line supposedly in keeping with a literal reading of Genesis that would account for the apparent age of the earth, the extinct creatures, the physiological similarities of related species -- etc. ad nauseum -- must bring in ludicrous stop-gap explanations that make hash of both the scientific data and the Biblical tale. I recently saw a pro-life bulletin board which had the nerve to site "the unique DNA" of the fetus in support of its position. I say "nerve" not in relation to their pro-life position but because I am certain that the sponsors of that billboard would categorically reject the idea of evolution. This is hypocrisy of a high -- or low -- order. Absent the process of evolution by natural selection the entire idea of DNA and heritable characteristics makes no sense at all. DNA is a mechanism for facilitating evolution -- in fact the DNA in our cells is most likely a direct descendent of the first quasi-organic self-replicating molecules.

For any reasonably educated person (provided he or she was educated in a state that still teaches science) in this day and age to reject the basic fact of evolution requires either a willful ignorance of the available evidence, or a dogma induced denial which can only be described as pathological. In this regard, and in many other similar cases, I believe that the fundamentalist mindset is a form of mental illness. To be fair, this applies equally to fundamentalist Christians, Muslims, Jews, Republicans, Democrats, Communists, Freudians, Clintonites or Darwinists.