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.
