Why Darwin Matters (7 page)

Bryan’s story reveals a common fear many people hold about the theory of evolution. A liberal and freethinker on so many other issues, Bryan took a stand against evolutionary theory after the First World War, when he became aware of the use of social Darwinism justifying militarism, imperialism, eugenics, and what he saw as “paralyzing the hope of reform” through its program of
“scientific breeding, a system under which a few supposedly superior intellects, self-appointed, would direct the mating and the movements of the mass of mankind.” He developed this view after reading the entomologist Vernon L. Kellog’s 1917 book
Headquarters Nights
, a recounting of the evenings Kellog spent listening to German military and intellectual leaders justify their militarism and imperialistic expansionism with classic social Darwinism—national survival of the fittest, improvement of the superior Germanic breed, and elimination of unfit races.
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Bryan became concerned for both his faith and his country. The enemy he identified, however, was not Germany, but evolutionary theory. “The evolutionary hypothesis carried to its logical conclusion, disputes every vital truth of the Bible,” he wrote in his final speech. “Its tendency, naturally, if not inevitably, is to lead those who really accept it, first to agnosticism and then to atheism. Evolutionists attack the truth of the Bible, not openly at first, but by using weasel-words like ‘poetical,’ ‘symbolical,’ and ‘allegorical’ to search out the meaning of the inspired record of man’s creation.” Scopes’s crime was to pass this poison on to the next generation:

The people of Tennessee have been patient enough; they acted none too soon. How can they expect to protect society, and even the church, from the deadening influence of agnosticism and atheism if they permit the teachers employed by taxation to poison the mind of the youth with this destructive doctrine? And remember, that the law has not heretofore required the writing of the word “poison” on poisonous doctrines. The bodies of our people are so valuable that the druggists and physicians must be careful to properly label all poisons; why not be as careful to protect the spiritual life of our people from the poisons that kill the soul?

Bryan’s fears about social Darwinism were rankled by the lawyer across the aisle. He narrowed his focus on Darrow, particularly on
the attorney’s famous and very public defense of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, the teenagers who abducted fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks and clubbed him to death with a chisel in what they had thought would be the “perfect crime.” After the boys confessed to the murder, Darrow agreed to take the case, employing a defense to shift the penalty from death to life in prison. His was a deterministic view of human behavior. “Man is in no sense the maker of himself and has no more power than any other machine to escape the law of cause and effect,” Darrow opined. The boys were not ultimately responsible for the murder because human volition is a fiction: “each act, criminal or otherwise, follows a cause; that given the same conditions the same result will follow forever and ever.”
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Darrow claimed that Leopold and Loeb were themselves victims, and their trial served as a platform for Darrow to argue the larger case that our actions are the product of environmental influences.
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Now Darrow was defending evolution in Dayton, and Bryan foresaw the future in which lawyers could argue that we are all just products of our brute animal heritage, “coerced by a fate fixed by the laws of heredity,” and thus not morally culpable for our actions. Bryan would not stand for it: If evolution were accepted, it would “destroy all sense of responsibility and menace the morals of the world.”

This was the “Great Commoner” who engaged great causes, the man who famously defended labor and attacked the gold standard by declaring, “you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”
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Of course Bryan saw the teaching of evolution as a war between science and religion:

Evolution is at war with religion because religion is supernatural, it is therefore the relentless foe of Christianity which is a revealed religion. Let us, then, hear the conclusion of the whole matter. Science is a magnificent material for force, but is not a
teacher of morals. It can also build gigantic intellectual ships, but it constructs no moral rudders for control of storm tossed human vessels. It not only fails to supply the spiritual element needed, but some of its unproven hypotheses rob the ship of its compass and thus endanger its cargo.

Soaring prose from a towering man, but he claimed a false war between science and religion. Accepting evolution does not force us to jettison our morals and ethics, and rejecting evolution does not ensure their constancy.
We should not press down upon the brow of education this crown of religious thorns; we should not crucify science upon a cross of religious gold
.

“Darwin’s bulldog,” Thomas Henry Huxley, proclaimed that the
Origin of Species
was “the most potent instrument for the extension of the realm of knowledge which has come into man’s hands since Newton’s
Principia,
” and lamented to himself “how extremely stupid not to have thought of that!” Ernst Mayr asserted that “it would be difficult to refute the claim that the Darwinian revolution was the greatest of all intellectual revolutions in the history of mankind.” Stephen Jay Gould called the theory of evolution one of the half dozen most important ideas in the entire history of Western thought. Richard Dawkins inquired what common ground we could find for conversation with an extraterrestrial intelligence, and answered “evolution”—because it is “a universal truth” that is common throughout the cosmos.
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If the theory of evolution is so profound and proven, why doesn’t everyone accept it as true? One source of resistance is the confusion over the verbs “accept” and “believe.” I use the verb
“accept” instead of the more common expression “believe in” because evolution is not a religious tenet, to which one swears allegiance or belief as a matter of faith. It is a factual reality of the empirical world. Just as one would not say “I believe in gravity,” one should not proclaim “I believe in evolution.” But getting hung up on the idea that one is supposed to “believe in” evolution just as you “believe in” God is just one brand of resistance to evolution. There are at least five specific reasons people resist the truth of evolutionary theory:

1.
A general resistance to science
. If you imagine that you have to “believe in” a scientific theory, a conflict arises between science and religion, in which you are forced to choose one over the other. In particular, if scientific discoveries do not appear to support religious tenets, the religious tend to opt for religion, while the secular tend to opt for science.

2.
Belief that evolution is a threat to specific religious tenets
. Occasionally, rather than choosing religion over science, religious believers attempt to use science to prove religious tenets, or to mold scientific findings to fit religious beliefs. For example, the effort to prove that the Genesis creation story is accurately reflected in the geological fossil record has led many creationists to conclude that the earth was created within the past 10,000 years. This is in sharp contrast to the geological evidence for a 4.6-billion-year-old Earth. If one insists on the findings of science squaring true with religious doctrines, this can lead to conflict between science and religion.

3.
The fear that evolution degrades our humanity
. After Copernicus toppled the pedestal of our cosmic centrality, Darwin delivered the coup de grâce by revealing us to be “mere” animals, subject to the same natural laws and historical forces as all other animals.

4.
The equation of evolution with ethical nihilism and moral degeneration
. Decrying the inevitable dark hole of existence that comes from a “life without meaning” has become a potent tool of social persuasion—what “meaning” means, precisely, being left to whoever is leading the lament. The neoconservative social commentator Irving Kristol expressed the sentiment tidily in 1991: “If there is one indisputable fact about the human condition it is that no community can survive if it is persuaded—or even if it suspects—that its members are leading meaningless lives in a meaningless universe.”
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Similar fears were raised by Nancy Pearcey, a fellow of the Intelligent Design hothouse the Discovery Institute, in a briefing before the House Judiciary Committee of the U.S. Congress. Pearcey cited a popular song urging “you and me, baby, ain’t nothing but mammals so let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel” and went on to claim that since the American legal system is based on moral principles, the only way to generate ultimate moral grounding—and, apparently, change the Billboard Top 40—is for the law to have an “unjudged judge,” an “uncreated creator.”
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God and mammon in the halls of Congress.

5.
The fear that evolutionary theory implies we have a fixed human nature
. The first four reasons for the resistance to evolutionary theory come almost exclusively from the political right. This last reason originates from the political left, from liberals who fear that the application of evolutionary theory to human thought and action implies that political policy and economic doctrines will fail because the constitution of humanity is stronger than the
constitutions of states. (This is what I call “liberal creationism,” the doppelganger of conservative creationism.)
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These fears say nothing about the evidence for evolution, and they do no more than conjecture about the effects of accepting evolution on human psychology and behavior. There will always be some—True Believers—who, like Bryan, will not be able to set aside their biggest fear: that accepting a scientific view of the natural world will challenge their faith in God.

But if one is a theist, it should not matter
when
God made the universe—ten thousand years ago or ten billion years ago. The difference of six zeros is meaningless to an omniscient and omnipotent being, and the glory of divine creation cries out for praise regardless of when it happened. Likewise, it should not matter
how
God created life—whether it was through a miraculous spoken word or through the natural forces of the universe that He created. The grandeur of God’s works command awe regardless of what processes He used. We have learned a lot in four thousand years, and that knowledge should never be dreaded or denied. Theists and theologians should embrace science, especially evolutionary theory, for what it has done to reveal the magnificence of the divinity in a depth never dreamed by our ancient ancestors.

There is, however, a greater threat to the theory of evolution today: not from those who resist evolution, but from those who misunderstand it. Most people know very little about evolution, and this makes it easier for the people who do not accept evolution to
encourage others to question the theory, even to the point of denial.
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In a 2001 Gallup poll, for example, a quarter of the people surveyed said they didn’t know enough to say whether they accepted evolution or not, and only 34 percent considered themselves to be “very informed” about it. Because evolution is so controversial, public school science teachers typically drop the subject entirely rather than face the discomfort aroused among students and parents. What is not taught is not learned.
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The modern Intelligent Design movement has seized on this misunderstanding, from their claim that evolution is “only a theory” to their narrowing of the scientific method to experiments in a laboratory to their insistence that any appearance of order in the natural world proves both design and the existence of a supernatural designer. It is this last argument that is especially appealing to those who are unsure about what exactly evolution means: What is so wrong with teaching that there is an intelligent design to life? Is there something wrong with wanting to see an Intelligent Designer in the universe?

Man has been here 32,000 years. That it took a hundred million years to prepare the world for him is 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.