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The Paul Rosenfels Community Social Progress through Personal Growth |
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The Paul Rosenfels Community Social Progress through Personal Growth |
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Any time a creationist turns around and sees something he doesn't understand he says, "God put it there," or "God works in mysterious ways." This spares him any temptation to get lost in thought, which for him is unfamiliar territory.
When I was a child I noticed that the world was full of ugliness: carnivory, cruelty, murder, war. Saying "God put it there" didn't help much. Only the theory of evolution helped place these human capacities in a larger context. There must have been some point in time when there was a good reason for such capabilities to have emerged even if they were now vestigial.
Creationists feel threatened by the theory of evolution because their handlers have reduced it to "social darwinism", a parody of the Darwinian model that imagines brutal individuals to be fitter to survive. Since Christians are cowardly and think of themselves as sheep, it's only natural that they're afraid of big bad wolves. If they knew what case studies of evolution have actually taught us, though, they would be astonished.
If you think evolution always favors musclemen over 90-pound weaklings, for example, consider the fact that careful observation reveals that humans, like house cats, have become kinder and gentler over thousands of years precisely because of selection pressures. Even geek cuttlefish are beating out jocks in the cephalopod mating game:
Giant cuttlefish off the coast of Australia, long known as masters of camouflage, can use their color-changing abilities in a remarkable act of sexual deception: smallish males, unfit for winning wrestling matches with stronger rivals, disguise themselves as females in order to elude their adversaries and discretely mate with the genuine article. It's astounding, but not entirely unusual. The animal kingdom is rife with such "sneaker" males as well as an array of courtship and mating tactics more devious than any found in a Harlequin romance.
And while an armchair evolutionist like me can afford to write off lots of mysteries by saying, "there must have been a good reason for this to have evolved", it's a bit more complicated for a working scientist. Evolution is not supposed to be an explanation of last resort, like God, something to turn to when all other explanations fail. An evolutionary biologist will say, "I wonder if there was a good reason for this to have evolved," and then try to find evidence for and against this hunch. If evidence is not forthcoming then either he must wait till until it is, or until some other explanation emerges — or until he reviews his canvas and no longer feels any explanation is necessary.
Or he can just leave it in the realm of the unknown with so many other questions we can't yet tackle. The trick is not to pretend you have an easy answer for everything. You don't want to sound like a professor, after all. Or a fundamentalist.
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© 2009 Rachel Bartlett See more of Rachel's collages |
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