Why Darwin Matters (25 page)

Just as He was finishing up the loose ends of the creation, God realized that Adam’s immediate descendants would not understand inflationary cosmology, global general relativity, quantum mechanics, astrophysics, biochemistry, paleontology, and evolutionary biology, so
he created creation myths. But there were so many creation stories throughout the world that God realized this too was confusing, so created He anthropologists and mythologists to explain all that
.

By now the valley of the shadow of doubt was overrun with skepticism, so God became angry—so angry that God lost His temper and cursed the first humans, telling them to go forth and multiply themselves (but not in those words). But the humans took God literally and now there are over six billion of them. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day
.

By now God was tired, so He proclaimed, “Thank Me it’s Friday,” and He made the weekend. It was a good idea
.

Over the past century, nearly every court case and curriculum dispute in the evolution-creation debate has included some form of the “equal time” argument. Well, even if we all agreed public school science classes should spend equal time on each perspective, we must ask, Equal time for whom? My friend and colleague Eugenie Scott, Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education, outlines at least eight different positions one might take on the creation-evolution continuum.
^*
These include:

Young Earth Creationists
, who believe that the earth and all life on it were created within the last ten thousand years.

Old Earth Creationists
, who believe that the earth is ancient and that although microevolution may alter organisms into different varieties of species, all life was created by God and species cannot evolve into new species.

Gap Creationists
, who believe that there was a large temporal gap between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2, in which a pre-Adam creation was destroyed and God recreated the world in six days; the time gap between the two separate creations allows for an accommodation of an old Earth with the special creation.

Day-Age Creationists
, who believe that each of the six days of creation represents a geological epoch, and that the Genesis sequence of creation roughly parallels the sequence of evolution.

Progressive Creationists
, who accept most scientific findings about the age of the universe and that God created “kinds” of animals sequentially; the fossil record is an accurate representation of history because different animals and plants appeared at different times rather than having been created all at once.

Intelligent Design Creationists
, who believe that the order, purpose, and design found in the world are proof of an Intelligent Designer.

Evolutionary Creationists
, who believe that God used evolution to bring about life according to his foreordained plan from the beginning.

Theistic Evolutionists
, who believe that God used evolution to bring about life, but intervenes at critical intervals during the history of life.

Note that the Intelligent Design creationists are but one of many competing for space in the curriculum; if the government were to force teachers to grant equal time for them, then why not these
others? And this short list does not include the creation theories of other cultures, such as:

No Creation Story
from India, where the world has always existed as it is now, unchanging from eternity.

The Slain Monster Creation Story
from Sumeria-Babylonia, in which the world was created from the parts of a slain monster.

The Primordial Parents Creation Stories
from the Zuñi Indians, Cook Islanders, and Egyptians, in which the world was created by the interaction of primordial parents.

The Cosmic Egg Creation Stories
from Japan, Samoa, Persia, and China, in which the world was generated from an egg.

The Spoken Edict Creation Stories
from the Mayans, the Egyptians, and the Hebrews, in which the world sprang into being at the command of a god (this is the belief of creationists and Intelligent Design theorists).

The Sea Creation Stories
from the Burmese, Choctaw Indians, and Icelanders, in which the world was created from out of the sea.

If equal time were given to all of these positions, along with the many other creation myths from diverse cultures around the world, when would students have time for science?

^*
For a fuller explication, visit their Web site at
http://www.natcenscied.org/
.

1.
We were accompanied on this expedition by botanist Phil Pack, snail specialist Robert Smith, explorer Daniel Bennett, and medical engineer Chuck Lemme.

2.
Sulloway’s historical reconstruction of the development of Darwin’s evolutionary thinking can be found in a number of his papers: Frank Sulloway, “Darwin and His Finches: The Evolution of a Legend,”
Journal of the History of Biology
15 (1982), pp. 1–53; “Darwin’s Conversion: The
Beagle
Voyage and Its Aftermath,”
Journal of the History of Biology
15 (1982), pp. 325–96; “The Legend of Darwin’s Finches,”
Nature
303 (1983), p. 372; “Darwin and the Galapagos,”
Biological Journal of the Linnean Society
21 (1984), pp. 29–59.

3.
Letter to Joseph Hooker dated January 14, 1844, quoted in Janet Browne,
Voyaging: Charles Darwin. A Biography
(New York: Knopf, 1995), p. 452.

4.
Darwin would have waited even longer had he not rushed into print for priority’s sake because the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace had sent Darwin his own theory of evolution the year before. For a detailed account of the “priority dispute” between Darwin and Wallace, see Michael Shermer,
In Darwin’s Shadow: The Life and Science of Alfred Russel Wallace
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

5.
Ernst Mayr,
Growth of Biological Thought
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 495.

6.
All quotes on the reaction to Darwin’s theory are from K. Korey,
The Essential Darwin: Selections and Commentary
(Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, 1984).

7.
Interestingly, a sizable 41 percent believe that parents, rather than scientists (28 percent) or school boards (21 percent), should be responsible for teaching
children about the origin and evolution of life. Pew Research Center for the People & the Press survey data available online at
http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=254
.

8.
Elisabeth Bumiller, “Bush Remarks Roil Debate on Teaching of Evolution,”
New York Times
, August 3, 2005.

9.
I have written about this at length in my book
How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God
(New York: Times Books, 1999).

10.
Adapted and paraphrased from Ernst Mayr,
The Growth of Biological Thought
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 501.

11.
Theodosius Dobzhansky, “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution,”
American Biology Teacher
35 (1973), pp. 125–29.

1.
Letter reprinted in Francis Darwin,
The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin
, Vol. 2 (London: John Murray, 1887), p. 121.

2.
When Darwin was in college there was a debate raging over the concept of induction—what it is and how it is used in science. Although definitions varied, it was roughly understood to mean arguing from the specific to the general, from data to theory. In 1830, the astronomer John Herschel argued that induction was reasoning from the known to the unknown. In 1840, the philosopher of science William Whewell insisted that induction was the superimposing of concepts on facts by the mind, even if they are not empirically verifiable. In 1843, the philosopher John Stuart Mill claimed that induction was the discovery of general laws from specific facts, but that they had to be verified empirically. Kepler’s discovery of the laws of planetary motion were a classic case study of induction. For Herschel and Mill, Kepler discovered these laws through careful observation and induction. For Whewell, the laws were self-evident truths that could have been known a priori. By the 1860s, as the theory of evolution was gaining momentum and converts, Herschel and Mill carried the day, not so much because they were right and Whewell was wrong, but because empiricism was becoming integral to the understanding of how good science is done. This drove Darwin to compile copious data for his theory before going public. Classic texts in this debate include John F. W. Herschel,
Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy
(London: Longmans, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1830); William Whewell,
The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences
(London: J. W. Parker, 1840); and John Stuart Mill,
A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive, Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence, and the Methods of Scientific Investigation
(London: Longmans, Green, 1843).

3.
Francis Darwin (ed.),
The Autobiography of Charles Darwin and Selected Letters
(New York: Dover Publications, 1958), p. 98. Originally published 1892.

4.
T. H. Huxley,
Darwiniana
(New York: Appleton, 1896), p. 72.

5.
In Francis Darwin,
More Letters of Charles Darwin
, Vol. 2 (London: John Murray, 1903), p. 323.

6.
Francis Darwin (ed.),
Autobiography of Charles Darwin
.

7.
John Ray,
The Wisdom of God Manifested in Works of the Creation
(London: Samuel Smith, 1691).

8.
William Paley,
Natural Theology: or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature
(London: E. Paulder, 1802).

9.
For a thorough discussion of Paley’s influence on Darwin, see Keith Thomson,
Before Darwin
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005).

10.
Letter from Charles Darwin to John Lubbock, November 15, 1859, in Francis Darwin,
The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin
, Vol. 2, p. 8.

11.
Ernst Mayr,
Toward a New Philosophy of Biology
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).

12.
Ernst Mayr, “Species Concepts and Definitions,” in
The Species Problem
(Washington, D.C.: American Association for the Advancement of Science Publication 50, 1957). Mayr offers this expanded definition: “A species consists of a group of populations which replace each other geographically or ecologically and of which the neighboring ones intergrade or hybridize wherever they are in contact or which are potentially capable of doing so (with one or more of the populations) in those cases where contact is prevented by geographical or ecological barriers.” See also Ernst Mayr,
Evolution and the Diversity of Life
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976).