Thanks to Gary Walsh for the link.

Reposted from:
http://www.thestar.com/article/308305

Royal Ontario Museum:
http://www.rom.on.ca/exhibitions/special/darwin.php

A major evolution exhibit opens in Toronto next week, which begs the question: Why so much fuss over a 150-year-old theory that seems to gather more scientific support by the decade?

Mar 01, 2008 04:30 AM
GEOFF PEVERE
BOOKS COLUMNIST

It's perfectly fitting that what is billed as the most in-depth exposition of artefacts related to Charles Darwin's development of the theory that man descended from other, earlier life forms – called Darwin: The Evolution Revolution – will find its temporary home in the Royal Ontario Museum beginning March 8, for that has traditionally been the type of setting where human beings and their prehistoric ancestors actually come face to face.

All other encounters, especially between homo sapiens and the giant lizards that predated them by untold millennia, are pure fantasy. Much, that is, to the chagrin of generations of young boys.

The fact is, there comes a time in the formative development of any young nerd when the crushing truth about dinosaurs sets in. Irresistibly cool as the idea may be, they never met people.

Or so science insists. Dinosaurs and people were separated by millions of years, and they would only be brought together in the comics, cartoons and pulp novels that fed the imagination, and – as technology permitted – in movies like King Kong, One Million B.C., and – surely this is why God created computers – Jurassic Park.

It was a case of popular culture providing what science could not. Since the very idea of men roaming the same planet as giant reptiles was just too good to resist – who can imagine Fred without Dino? – a virtual subgenre of fantasy entertainment has specialized in that very spectacle.

It's a spectacle that Charles Darwin made necessary. With the publication of his On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection, Or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life in 1859, the controversy-averse, socially shy British naturalist (described by one biographer as "a reclusive biologist who wrote books") almost single-handedly upended the prevailing paradigm concerning the relationship between man, God and Nature. Where a concept of divine design in nature had prevailed for centuries, Darwin – a non-religious scientific materialist – offered something radically, startlingly and heretically different: a vision of nature processing change in life forms by force of circumstance, a process of constant situational adaptation that saw survival as the only `design' at work. Ergo, dinosaurs go when they can no longer cut it, and man only comes along when natural circumstances permit.

Small wonder Darwin himself sat on the revelation for years before publishing it. He knew what was coming. As he wrote in a letter, he felt like he was "committing murder."

While there remains much dispute as to just what Darwin killed or how effectively he did so, at the very least he strangled the notion that history might have contained that fabulously dramatic moment when men went spear to talon with T-rex. Never happened. At least not in nature. But who needs nature (or Charles Darwin) when you've got movies?

Yet there may be no country in the world other than America where a movie featuring both dinosaurs and people would be regarded as the truth.

Consider the statistics. According to Susan Jacoby's recent book The Age of American Unreason, which singles out certain anti-Darwinian strains in American culture as an especially egregious example of the country's drift away from rationalism, "Fewer than half of Americans – 48 per cent – accept any form of evolution (even guided by God), and just 26 per cent accept Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. Fully 42 per cent say that all living beings, including humans, have existed in their present form since the beginning of time."

Jacoby is quoting data from a 2005 survey conducted by the PEW Forum on Religion and Life, and the figures show up once again in David Quammen's The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, a book that attempts to put both Darwin and his theories in some kind of clear, rational context. Noble though Quammen's intentions may be, they might also be quixotic, especially considering just how many Americans seem to be willing to express their views on evolution and natural selection without having much idea what they are. As Kevin Phillips points out in American Theocracy, a volume addressing the hugely consequential convergence of religious fundamentalism and politics in Bush's U.S.A., "In 1993, an international social survey ranked Americans last – behind Bulgaria and Slovenia – in knowledge of the basic facts of evolution."

To quote Groucho: "Whatever it is, I'm against it."

But does this ignorance of the specifics of Darwin's theories actually prevent the controversy from being even more explosive? Quammen, for one, thinks so. Pointing out that the idea of evolution – wherein life forms change over time – is profoundly less theologically threatening than the idea of natural selection – wherein evolution is determined solely by an organism's situational response to natural circumstances, and thus utterly bereft of divine design – the author raises the notion that it may actually be a good thing that people think they know more about Darwin than they actually do.

"His biggest idea, bigger than mere evolution," writes Quammen, "was just too big, too harsh and threatening. It was called `natural selection' and identified as the primary mechanism of evolutionary change." If you're looking for the God-hole in Darwin, this is it: "(Natural selection) embodies a deep chanciness," Quammen notes, "that is contradictory to the notion that Earth's living creatures, their capacities (including human capacities), their histories, their indigenousness to particular locales, and their interrelations all reflect some sort of divinely preordained plan. Creationist proselytizers pursuing Christian political agendas are therefore right to regard it with loathing and alarm."

A year before the PEW survey was taken, the Gallup organization interviewed more than 1,000 Americans over the phone. Among the statements presented for response was: "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at some time within the last 10,000 years or so." As Quammen notes in the introduction to The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, 45 per cent of those surveyed agreed. Thirty-eight per cent of the respondents agreed that human beings "have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process." Only 13 per cent agreed with what might be called Darwin's original principle: that humans have evolved over time from other life forms with nature – and not God – as their only guide.

Clearly, there's something about (to borrow the title of a 2001 documentary) Darwin's Dangerous Idea that continues to meet aggressive and even mounting resistance more than a century and a half after they were first published. As Quammen notes: "Certainly those Gallup results – combined with the continuing political offensive against teaching evolutionary biology in public schools – testify that Charles Darwin isn't just perennially significant. He's also urgently relevant to education and governance."

Urgent is the word. If anything, Darwin's ideas are only becoming more dangerous as we approach the 200th anniversary of his birth. As Jacoby notes, there is actually more resistance, especially in America, today than there was one, two, three or even six generations ago. Why is this happening? Why, despite the fact that creationism, along with its uptown cousin "intelligent design," keeps getting expelled (as recently as 2005's Kitzmiller v. Dover ruling) as non-science from science classrooms by some of America's highest courts, while Darwin's "theory" has not only never been disproved but has actually accumulated only more supporting evidence over the decades? Why, nearly 200 years after his birth, are people so afraid of Charles Darwin?

To understand this, you need to understand not only Darwin and his theories but America itself. As fundamentalism (a term which first came into being after the widely-covered Scopes trial of the 1920s) has risen in power and influence in the United States, so has the resistance to the notion of evolution, let alone natural selection. For if one accepts the ideas of Darwin, one cannot subscribe to a fundamentalist notion of God. One cannot accept the idea of Genesis as a literal rendering of the creation of man and the universe, and one must accept the idea that the only "guiding" force in nature is adaptation to circumstance in order to survive. This is not to say that there is no God (and Darwin never suggested so), only that the idea of God itself must be rethought in a post-Darwinian world. To survive Darwin's dangerous ideas, even the almighty is compelled to adapt.

Geoff Pevere frequently writes about popular culture. He can be reached at gpevere@thestar.ca