Do You Really Believe in Evolution?

When the ink on my university diploma was still wet, I decided to become a high school teacher. As I studied to earn my teaching certificate, I learned that teaching programs are more concerned with ideology than subjects such as science, math, or grammar. One area of great concern was that the theory of evolution was under attack by creationists.

We were told that as science teachers we would be constantly assaulted by people who believed that some god created the universe, that people are different than animals, that humans have souls, and that certain dogma must never be questioned. When I finally began to teach, I did indeed run into students opposed to evolution. I taught physics, biology, and earth science and in nearly every class room, my science lessons were interrupted by students who found Darwin distasteful. They told me that a loving god would never create humans who were like monkeys. They told me that science could not be possibly right, because humans have a divine spark in them that sets them apart.

My instructors in the education courses showed a palpable dislike of creationist students whom they saw as the enemies of reason and enlightenment. Myself, I love science and truth with a nearly religious fervor, but I found that I could sympathize with the view that science can sometimes be at odds with what we feel must be right. As I learned about the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics, I encountered ideas that were terribly counterintuitive and at times unacceptable. I didn’t like that the speed of light is a limit. If we are to accept relativity, then we must also accept that humanity will never be able to easily fly from star to star, because the distance are just too great. I couldn’t accept that some effects might not have causes, or as Einstein said, “God doesn’t play dice with the universe”. Einstein is just one of many good scientists who recognized how difficult it can be to accept the world as it really is. The Nobel Laureate physicist Richard Feynman is famous for saying, “If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics”. There you have it, science sometimes asks us to believe things which are unbelievable or distasteful.

I want you to ask yourself a question: do you really believe in evolution? IF you say ‘yes’, are you truly convinced, or do you say ‘yes’ because it is trendy? Perhaps you only accept the teachings of Darwin because your friends do or because the people who go to the good parties with nice wine and cheese would look down on you if you said otherwise.  How well do you understand the ideas behind evolution? How well do you understand its implications?  Is it possible that if you really understood evolution, you might find creationism to be much more enticing?

Creationists have a number of books and web sites that explain why they find evolution distasteful, but why should the average educated person not embrace evolution? Let’s look again at the illustration above.

Here we see a modern human and the version that came before. In truth, the reality is much more complicated since there is not a clean change from one human species to the next. New species are born due to events such as mutations, bottle necks, and populations being isolated from one another. In reality, the modern human and the obsolete human lived side by side for a while, but what happened to the obsolete model? The painful truth is that his children died when the modern human hunted all of the deer, picked all of the berries and wouldn’t share any. The obsolete humans in desperation went to war with the modern humans, but their military techniques were inferior so they lost the battle, the war, and the right to exist.

If we look at the man walking behind the modern human, we must ask ourselves, was he nice? Were his children adorable? Did he sing songs? Did he laugh and cry? Why did his people all die? Did the world need to work that way?

In the theory of evolution we find that all humans have the capacity for competition and cooperation. Humans can be cruel as well as altruistic and kind. However, the story of evolution is one of cooperating with the people who will help move you forward and competing with the people who will hold you back. Evolution has ample room for kindness and generosity, but it demands that there be times of genocide.

Do we who consume wine and cheese at parties, shop at Whole Foods Market, never spank our children, and embrace diversity really have room in our world view for evolution? The creationists tell us that humans contain a divine spark, while Darwinists tell us that humans are simply another animal. Nature dictates that evolutionary progress can only occur through extinction and genocide. Which do we accept, the world that ought to be, or the less kind world that science claims exists?