By Stanley Rogouski, 5/22/06
To put yourself in the right mind to go see the Nile’s Eldredge’s
Darwin exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History, I suggest
doing the following. Make sure all of the data on your computer is
backed up to DVDs. Then open the case of your computer and run a magnet
over the hard drive. Throw the hard drive in the trash, go to a
CompUSA, buy a new one and spend the better part of a weekend copying
the information from the DVDs back onto the new hard drive. Unless
you’re a remarkably ordered, meticulous person, the unorganized data
you have stored on DVDs will mean something very different from the
organized data you had on the hard drive before you destroyed it. If,
like me, you own three Nikon DSLR bodies that you use relentlessly, you
will find yourself quickly overwhelmed by the sheer volume of data
you’ve created.
Charles Darwin did not come up with the idea of evolution. In fact,
his grandfather Erasmus had speculated on the transmutation of species
decades earlier and a man named Robert Chambers had published a book
called Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation that had become a
best seller shortly after Darwin returned from his voyage around the
world on the Beagle. Darwin had not even been the only person to
propose the theory of natural selection. Another naturalist, Alfred
Russell Wallace, a contemporary of Darwin’s, had developed the same
theory almost simultaneously. In fact, it was Wallace’s letters to
Darwin announcing his intentions to publish his own work that finally
motivated Darwin to publish Origin of Species, over 20 years after he
had essentially finished work on the theories of evolution and natural
selection.
The reason we all remember Darwin’s name and not Wallace’s, the
reason why Charles Darwin is a world historical figure is the fact that
he not only developed the theory of natural selection but documented it
in a way so thorough, so meticulous, so well-ordered and in such
overwhelming detail that to read Origin of Species and come away still
thinking that the earth is only 6000 years old would be a bit like
spending the day at the Uffizi and denying that there had ever been a
Renaissance. Indeed, Eldredge has created his own mini Darwin museum
within the Museum of Natural History documenting Darwin’s power to
document, his passion for detail and his astonishing ability to gather
evidence and generalize from what he’s found. You come away in awe at
Charles Darwin’s powers of observation and almost conclude that you’re
in the presence of an intellect of an almost entirely different species
from your own. Origin of Species, simply put, is the greatest piece of
detective work in history.
But the Uffizi can be burned to the ground. Books can be burnt.
Libraries can be destroyed. Culture’s erased. It’s happened many times
before in history. The Alexandria Library was destroyed with hundreds
of thousands of scrolls and thousands of works of art. Eastern European
Jewish culture was all but wiped out by the Nazis. The Taliban blew two
giant statues of Buddha off the face of the earth. The Nazis desecrated
the grave of Leo Tolstoy and shamefully, our own neoconservative Arab
haters stood by and did nothing while the national museum in Baghdad
was looted and as history disappeared right before our eyes.
The Buddhas of Bamiyan had been attacked before. Genghis Khan had
take shots at them and Aurangzeb the last Mughal emperor had dragged
heavy artillery up to the spot where they were carved into the side of
the mountain and tried to blow them off the face of the earth. But it
wasn’t until Mullah Omar and the Taliban were able to enforce the most
literal interpretation of the Koran with 20th Century weapons that they
finally met their end.
The great cultural tradition embodied in Origin of Species, the
repository of natural history built up by Darwin himself, the body of
medical knowledge that depends on knowing how natural selection works
for its very existence, the methods of observation, cataloguing, and
the language he used have also been attacked before. We all remember
the Scopes trial, the attempts to label biology texts, the silly
‘Creation Science’ debates from the 1980s, all of the previous attempts
to blow Darwin’s image from the face of the cliff that just bounced off
the hard rock of scientific fact.
But now, like with the Buddhas at Bamiyan, Darwin’s opponents are
armed with the latest weapons, partly developed by the very scientific
methods they reject. A refined version of ‘Creation Science’,
‘Intelligent Design’ has been developed as a way to make teaching the
Bible in science classes look reasonable. The corporate media in its
‘fair and balanced’ way would rather assume that there are two sides to
any ‘debate’ and talk to ‘spokesmen’ for both rather than take the time
to do the research necessary to distinguish between fact and fiction.
The President of the United States is busy sticking his nose into
medical and scientific research and carefully vetting it against his
reading of the first few chapters of Genesis.
No, the Christian right isn’t literally throwing books into bonfires
(yet) or blowing up gigantic statues of Buddha (yet) but their attacks
on the theory of evolution and on natural science can almost be looked
at as a kind of ‘virtual book burning’.
This is not an attack on religion. The Catholic Church, reactionary
institution that it is, while promoting ideas that are impossible to
explain using the scientific method, does not attack the scientific
method. Rather, it claims that faith and science are two separate
realities. Every mainline protestant church, as far as I know, accepts
the theory of evolution and the scientific method, as do all but the
most ultra orthodox sects of Judaism. Indeed, John Stevens Henslow,
Darwin’s mentor at Cambridge was an Anglican clergyman and Darwin
himself at one time considered becoming a Church of England vicar.
What makes Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Tony Perkins, Charles
Colson and George Bush different from the Vatican or the Archbishop of
Canterbury is the fact that they are trying to radically remake the way
we acquire and evaluate information. Instead of throwing copies of
Origin of Species into a bonfire and burning down repositories of
fossils and natural specimens, these Christian fascists are attempting
to shout down spokesman for evolution through the media, use the
democratic process to make natural science subject to the standards of
a barroom shouting match, to transform reality by preemptively
outlawing any way of approaching reality that doesn’t match their own.
Indeed, to talk to any Christian fundamentalist about the theory of
evolution is to realize that their project is basically a destructive
one. Any inability of any individual to explain why natural section
works the way it does, any flaw in Darwin’s methodology, any new
information not yet assimilated into an evolutionary frameworks means
that the entire explanation for the beginnings of humanity defaults to
the King James Bible. So they attack and they attack and they attack
because the more of evolutionary theory and natural science they can
discredit, the more credibility (in their eyes) the King James Bible
ultimately has.
The real danger here is that, once they realize that they won’t be
able to shout down every spokesman for evolution or indeed to explain
how very much about medical science works without the theory of natural
selection, the Christian fundamentalists will start burning books,
blowing up museums, and killing biologists. This is almost as
inevitable as killing Catholic priests in Poland was for the Nazis,
once they decided that they needed their land as lebensraum.
In this sense, Niles Eldgedge and the American Museum of Natural
History would qualify as ‘conservative’ in the classic sense of the
word and Falwell, Perkins, and Robertson as ‘radicals’. Evolutionary
theory is not only an educated guess about reality. It’s a body of
work, a repository of knowledge, a living body of work, an intellectual
tradition, a physical reality. By gathering up so much of this rich
this tradition in one place Eldredge has made the case better than any
talking head in a debate on Fox News, and, what’s more, he’s made it
obvious what the stakes are, protecting civilization from barbarism.