Warm and fuzzy

Originally published 25 September 1989

Reli­gious fun­da­men­tal­ists in Cal­i­for­nia have mount­ed yet anoth­er attack on the teach­ing of evo­lu­tion in the schools. At issue is a pro­posed statewide text­book guide­line that asserts “Like grav­i­ta­tion and elec­tric­i­ty, evo­lu­tion is a fact and a theory.”

This state­ment is too much for the pow­er­ful Tra­di­tion­al Val­ues Coali­tion, a group that rep­re­sents more than 6,000 most­ly con­ser­v­a­tive church­es. The Coali­tion’s spokesper­son, Rev. Louis Shel­don, has been quot­ed as say­ing: “When you teach kids that they came from mon­keys, that’s a dead, dinosaur­al kind of thing. It’s a neg­a­tive. It’s not a warm, fuzzy kind of thing.”

Which rais­es an inter­est­ing ques­tion: Is truth warm and fuzzy?

Cer­tain­ly, infants do seem to pre­fer their truths warm and fuzzy. Most very young chil­dren would rather cud­dle a ted­dy bear than a Bar­bie doll. Toy stores are full of warm, fuzzy stuffed ani­mals, includ­ing mon­keys, to con­sole babes in the cradle.

Grow­ing up has some­thing to do with putting aside the ted­dy bear and the tat­tered secu­ri­ty blan­ket. Rev. Shel­don under­es­ti­mates our chil­dren when he insists that high school kids can’t han­dle cold and clam­my truths, like descent from rep­til­ian or amoe­bic ances­tors. And he for­gets that many pale­on­tol­o­gists now believe dinosaurs were warm-blood­ed ani­mals, not fuzzy per­haps, but cer­tain­ly warm.

The Cal­i­for­nia con­tro­ver­sy is not about reli­gion, but sci­ence edu­ca­tion. “I’m a Chris­t­ian min­is­ter,” says Shel­don. “I work on the body politic. I approach it from a gut lev­el.” He believes that warm and fuzzy truths are eas­i­er to sell, from the class­room lectern as well as the pul­pit. And of course he’s right, as anoth­er suc­cess­ful com­mu­ni­ca­tor, Walt Dis­ney, discovered.

Evolution of Mickey

In one of his always delight­ful essays, Har­vard pale­on­tol­o­gist Stephen Jay Gould traces the “evo­lu­tion” of Mick­ey Mouse from the time of his cre­ation by Dis­ney, in 1928, to the mouse we know today. The ear­ly Mick­ey was a bit of a ras­cal, mis­chie­vous, even occa­sion­al­ly cru­el. And he looked more or less like a real adult mouse: small head in pro­por­tion to body, pointy nose com­pared to cra­nial vault, beady eyes, spindly legs.

As time passed, Mick­ey’s per­son­al­i­ty soft­ened and his appear­ance changed. Head and cra­nial vault became enlarged, eyes grew to half the size of the face, limbs got pudgi­er. Gould elu­ci­dates the evo­lu­tion­ary prin­ci­ple behind Mick­ey’s trans­for­ma­tion: It is called neote­ny, or pro­gres­sive juvenilization.

Mick­ey became a nation­al sym­bol, and Amer­i­cans like their nation­al sym­bols cute and cud­dly. Mick­ey’s chrono­log­i­cal age did not change, but he devel­oped baby­ish fea­tures. To explain these per­haps uncon­scious devel­op­ments on the part of Dis­ney’s artists, Gould refers to the work of ani­mal behav­ior­ist Kon­rad Lorenz, who believed that juve­nile facial and body fea­tures release “innate trig­ger­ing mech­a­nisms” for affec­tion and nur­tur­ing in adult humans.

The adap­tive val­ue of this response is obvi­ous, since the nur­tur­ing of young is nec­es­sary for sur­vival of the species. Thus, accord­ing to Lorenz, evo­lu­tion has pro­vid­ed us with a car­ing response to juve­nile fea­tures, a genet­i­cal­ly-pro­grammed reac­tion that appar­ent­ly over­flows onto oth­er species.

If Lorenz is right, ted­dy bears, Andy Pan­das, and stuffed baby mon­keys are ben­e­fi­cia­ries of our innate nur­tur­ing response to big eyes, round cra­ni­ums, and pudgy limbs. Mick­ey, too, evolved juve­nile fea­tures in response to pub­lic pref­er­ence for all things warm and cud­dly. And when the Rev. Shel­don plumps for a warm and fuzzy the­o­ry of human ori­gins, he may be exploit­ing a bio­log­i­cal instinct pro­vid­ed by evolution.

Truth not warm and fuzzy

Alas, truth is not always warm and fuzzy. It would be com­fort­able to imag­ine, as did our ances­tors, that we live in a cra­dle-like, nur­tur­ing uni­verse, cen­tered about our­selves — a cen­tral Earth, embraced by near­by, con­sol­ing stars. The truth, how­ev­er, turned out to be rather dif­fer­ent. Our Earth is but a speck of dust in a vast uni­verse of galax­ies, and it is a mea­sure of our adult­hood that we have the courage to accept the more dif­fi­cult truth.

It is also com­fort­ing to imag­ine that our species had its ori­gin in a warm and secure nurs­ery, a boun­ti­ful gar­den per­haps, presided over by a watch­ful par­ent, but again the truth turned out oth­er­wise. The Rev. Shel­don is right about the sci­en­tif­ic ver­sion of human ori­gins; it is “dinosaur­al,” and it does stress our rela­tion­ship to “dead” species.

Evo­lu­tion is not warm and fuzzy. It can even be mis­chie­vous, and some­times cru­el. It does, how­ev­er, have much that rec­om­mends itself to the adult mind; evo­lu­tion is a fact, by every cri­te­ri­on of science.

It is one of the glo­ries of a free soci­ety that peo­ple can believe what­ev­er they want about human ori­gins. And cer­tain­ly sci­en­tif­ic truth is not infal­li­ble. But high school kids do not need intel­lec­tu­al secu­ri­ty blan­kets. By insist­ing that sci­ence text­books be warm and fuzzy, Cal­i­for­nia cre­ation­ists par­tic­i­pate in the infan­ti­za­tion of the next gen­er­a­tion of Americans.