Darwin’s dangerous de-evolution

Originally published 6 September 1999

“Our school sys­tems teach the chil­dren that they are noth­ing but glo­ri­fied apes who have evo­lu­tion­ized out of some pri­mor­dial soup of mud,” said House Repub­li­can Major­i­ty Whip Tom DeLay, by way of explain­ing the school mas­sacre in Columbine, Col­orado.

His remark would be mere­ly sil­ly were not sim­i­lar thoughts com­mon­ly expressed by influ­en­tial reli­gious fun­da­men­tal­ists. Pop­u­lar anti-evo­lu­tion­ists such as the Rev. James Kennedy of The Cen­ter for Reclaim­ing Amer­i­ca and Kent Hov­ind of Cre­ation Sci­ence Evan­ge­lism are fond of sug­gest­ing that the teach­ing of evo­lu­tion is a root cause of a sup­posed decline in Amer­i­can morality.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard fun­da­men­tal­ist evan­ge­lists sug­gest that the rea­son sci­en­tists embrace evo­lu­tion is so they can dis­miss God from the equa­tion and there­by lead dis­solute lives with­out fear of divine retribution.

The thought is both stu­pid and insulting.

I haven’t looked, but I am sure some objec­tive research has been done on the link between reli­gion and moral­i­ty. I’m will­ing to wager Mr. DeLay $1,000 that the research — if it’s out there — will show that on aver­age athe­ists, agnos­tics, evo­lu­tion­ist Chris­tians, Jews, Hin­dus, Bud­dhists, and Moslems are no less moral in their dai­ly lives than Chris­tians who take lit­er­al­ly the sev­en days of Genesis.

And if the research is not out there, per­haps we can devise a test of the accu­ra­cy of his observation.

Let’s com­pare, say, a ran­dom sam­ple of evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gists with a ran­dom sam­ple of bib­li­cal lit­er­al­ists with respect to traf­fic vio­la­tions, adul­tery, cheat­ing on tax­es, hand­gun crimes, hate crimes, or any oth­er com­mon­ly agreed mea­sure of pub­lic or pri­vate morality.

I’m con­fi­dent that sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ences will be nonexistent.

What I’m sug­gest­ing here is that a basic altru­is­tic moral­i­ty is part of the human con­di­tion, irre­spec­tive of the Ten Com­mand­ments or any oth­er reli­gious code of behav­ior, per­haps because we have evolved that way dur­ing our long jour­ney from the pri­mor­dial soup.

Which is not to dis­miss the many fine ways insti­tu­tion­al­ized reli­gions rein­force human virtue. At their best, the church­es are pow­er­ful influ­ences for good. But let’s not for­get that a lot of nasty busi­ness has also been per­pe­trat­ed in the name of religion.

I’m an evo­lu­tion­ist because I judge the evi­dence for the uni­ty of life by com­mon descent over bil­lions of years to be over­whelm­ing, not so that I can cheat on my wife or kick the cat with impuni­ty. I live in no hope of heav­en or fear of hell, but like most of my fel­low Amer­i­cans of all reli­gious per­sua­sions, I try to live a decent life. Folks like Tom DeLay just can’t get it through their heads that a per­son can choose to live eth­i­cal­ly because civ­i­lized life requires doing unto oth­ers as you would have them do unto you.

So why bring all of this up once again in the health and sci­ence pages? Because as we have seen recent­ly in Kansas, school boards dom­i­nat­ed by reli­gious fun­da­men­tal­ists are bent on dri­ving the teach­ing of evo­lu­tion out of the pub­lic schools. They decid­ed to remove evo­lu­tion, the Big Bang, and oth­er evi­dences of the Earth­’s antiq­ui­ty from among top­ics to be cov­ered on statewide tests for eval­u­at­ing stu­dents, there­by ensur­ing that these sub­jects will be mar­gin­al­ized in the curriculum.

They might as well ban sci­ence alto­geth­er and replace it with flat-Earth the­o­ry or astrol­o­gy. Sci­ence is an inter­na­tion­al, non­sec­tar­i­an truth-seek­ing enter­prise based on con­sen­sus, and the antiq­ui­ty of the earth and the uni­ty of life by com­mon descent are at the heart of the con­tem­po­rary con­sen­sus, uni­ver­sal­ly accept­ed with­in the sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty. Even the Pope, for God’s sake, admits that evo­lu­tion is more than “just a theory.”

I spent the past sum­mer in Ire­land, one of the most Chris­t­ian nations on the plan­et. The Irish are bemused and bewil­dered by what’s going on in Kansas. In oth­er parts of Europe edi­to­r­i­al com­ment has tend­ed toward increduli­ty and ridicule. No one over there can fig­ure out what the teach­ing of evo­lu­tion has to do with either reli­gious faith or ethics.

What the Kansas deci­sion does do — if it stands — is deprive Kansas high school kids of all reli­gious per­sua­sions from learn­ing about one of the grand uni­fy­ing ideas of sci­ence. “The alter­na­tive to think­ing in evo­lu­tion­ary terms is not to think at all,” said the Nobel-prizewin­ning British biol­o­gist Sir Peter Mede­war. What we are see­ing in Kansas is the dumb­ing down of sci­ence education.

Reli­gious fun­da­men­tal­ists have the right to raise their kids any way they want, but they do not have the right to impose their bib­li­cal lit­er­al­ism on oth­er stu­dents in the pub­lic schools. Every Amer­i­can who val­ues the sep­a­ra­tion of church and state should speak out against this mis­guid­ed attempt to sub­vert the non­sec­tar­i­an char­ac­ter of Amer­i­can pub­lic education.

When those Kansas kids get to col­lege they are going be at a seri­ous dis­ad­van­tage if they wish to enter the life sci­ences, or indeed any sci­ence. And I’ll wager they will be no less like­ly to shoot up their high school peers than the kids from Ire­land, Eng­land, France, or Japan for whom evo­lu­tion is at the core of the sci­ence curriculum.