Rhinocrisy

I took a long trip up to Montreal to visit my best friend Thomas, who is a painter. Pride compels me to post a link to some of his stuff. There’s a lot that could be said about that; our conversations tend to be incredibly dense and traverse a great deal of territory. But I’ll leave that aside and instead speak about my trip:

My ride was my roommate’s 1994 Honda Civic. It has a manual transmission and is in surprisingly good shape; she has put a lot of effort into keeping it well-maintained. It is a pleasure to drive, beyond the brute frustration of the actual experience of driving. That is something I think I have not truly begun to loathe with the intensity that it deserves. My return journey required me (due to some bad turns) to negotiate my way through downtown Boston in late afternoon, so-called “rush hour”. If there is anywhere a grand register of ironic misnomers, I feel certain that “rush hour” has earned itself a spot on the first page. How can people do this every day? An hour, trapped in a steel box, waiting to press that damn pedal, hating everyone in front of you, hating that evil thing, the traffic light. This, surely, is the leading contributor to heart disease in America.

Anyhow, I’m meandering too much,^* so I will come, at last, to my point.

Around about Burlington, VT, I tuned into the local NPR affiliate, featuring a program called “The Infinite Mind“. The subject of discussion was pets. Acquiring a pooch has been a long-standing obsession (Snoopy was an adored childhood totem), so I restrained my capriciousness and actually listened to the thing. One of the segments focused on the health benefits of having a pet, featuring Dr. Alan Beck, director of the Center for the Human-Animal Bond, and Dr. Susan Cohen, a social worker at the Animal Medical Center in New York City. Both of them had a lot to say about the reams of research on the matter, and were able to articulate a number of well-reasoned arguments supporting what would otherwise seem like crufty claims.

Then, about halfway through their segment, this well-trimmed ship of reason sailed off the edge of the earth and tumbled away through the void of space. Evolution came into the conversation. Clearly, we were told, human-animal relationships have a compelling evolutionary origin. See, back in the day, our cavemen ancestors would sometimes encounter wildebeest who were running away from saber-tooth tigers. Some of those cavemen would say to themselves, “Hmm. Maybe these wildebeest have a good reason to run away. Maybe, just maybe, we should run away too.” Others foolishly ignored this wildebeestial harbinger and sat around, comparing the lengths of their spears and seeing who could grunt louder. These latter were subsequently savagely slaughtered by the felicitous feline^†, while the more sapient animal-lovers made good their escape. Thus, over time, the evolutionary dominance of animal-lovers was assured.^‡

This absurd fantasy was well-received by the host of the show, and was declared to make “a lot of sense”. This, despite the total lack of any supporting research or even any compelling logic - or even the rudiments of logic - to the story. I can only assume that, since everyone on the show had a doctorate and had just finished citing a huge body of scientific research, that they are intimately familiar with what a scientific argument is, and can recognize its lack. But none of that was in evidence, here. One might imagine due deference to the guests on the host’s part to be the cause, but in that case, accolades were certainly not in order. I am more inclined to blame the credulity on the invocation of Evolution.

We’re all well-familiar with the trope passed around by Creationists, that Evolution, “Darwinism”, is a modern religion, as fundamentally based on faith as Shintoism or snake-handling Pentecostalism. As an evolutionary biologist, I can’t really take that seriously. The evidence is too plain and the theory built on it too vast and beautifully consistent to leave any room for doubt.

But I’m also acutely aware how absolutely wretched the state of education on the subject is. I went through one of the premier technical schools in the world, receiving what should ostensibly be a top-notch education in the biological sciences. And yet in that whole course of education, there was almost no instruction on evolution - maybe a single problem set’s worth on the subject of selection, some brief discussion of the Hardy-Weinberg principle, and that was it. People in this country do not, for the most part, learn a whole lot about evolution. Every child in this country is at least expected to be exposed to Newton’s Law of Gravitation, Coulomb’s Law, and perhaps even Maxwell’s equations. But almost none are taught about purifying selection, selective sweeps, genetic drift, or any other extremely basic evolutionary principles. Names like Motoo Kimura or R.A. Fisher, geniuses easily on par with the likes of Bohr or Feynman, are unknown.

So, when someone comes on the radio and spins a rambling, misplaced yarn about evolution, I don’t think I should be that surprised. We’re all taught to place evolution firmly within the domain of science - and we should - but most of us lack any sort of fundamental tools for thinking about evolutionary questions. Belief without understanding must surely be called faith. What else could it be?

The subject of Evolution fills a strange role in our society. It has been made one of the centerpieces in a culture war, between Dark Age anachronists on the one hand and those with more of a post-Enlightenment sensibility on the other. The former will condemn it; the latter will brandish it like a totem, like Cargo-cultists might wield a bamboo radio.

^* Even by the standards of this blog.

^‡ This argument, other than the snarkiness, is rendered exactly as it was given.

Posted on Tuesday, July 17th, 2007 at 9:20 pm | Biology, Religion | feed | reply | trackback