Darwin Saves

2011.06.24   prev     next

Nearly five years ago, a survey indicated that only 40% of Americans believe Darwin’s theory of evolution, to which some newsies/bloggers opined with alarm and dismay.

But so what? What’s the big deal? What if, for example, 60% of people didn’t believe in relativity? Or quantum theory? Or didn’t believe some of the more well-known claims of those theories? You don’t hear anyone saying, “60% of people in this country don’t believe in quantum theory — can you believe it? That’s atrocious.”

And even people who actually doubt quantum theory will almost certainly happily gobble up whatever slick technology we’re able to make using what we know about particle behavior. In the case of evolution, there isn’t any technology to gobble up. So:

Q:  Why is the evolution-belief stat so alarming to so many?

A:  Because the person expressing dismay at this statistic may think he’s referring to Darwin’s claims about the capabilities of mutation-selection evolution — but he’s really referring to the issue of what kind of society we’re going to have, and how science will be funded, and whether we’re going to turn into a theocracy, and things like that. All of which have nothing to do with the truth or falsehood of Darwinism’s core claim.

Let’s say you ask some typical citizens, “Do you believe evolution?” If they interpret your question as, “Do you believe in democracy and scientific progress?” then a 40% yes-rate indeed would be alarming and dismaying. But if a large percentage of them really are interpreting the question at face value, then there’s nothing alarming or dismaying about it at all. And, that holds irrespective of whether Darwin’s theory is or isn’t actually true. They’re expressing their basically irrelevant opinion of a theory about things that happened hundreds of thousands of years ago; a theory that has no bearing on anything they do and don’t do in our society today.

If you ask me if I think that neutrinos really exist, I would say, “Yeah, I think they probably do.” And if you then asked me what is the evidence for that, I would say, “I don’t really know what the evidence is — I think it has something to do with setting up immense containers to detect particles — but I trust that the great majority of physicists wouldn’t say that strong evidence exists if it wasn’t true. I can’t think of any reason why all these educated scientists would say those things, except that those things are actually true (or at least are the most common-sense inference from the available evidence).”

And if you asked me, why don’t you feel the same way about evolution? I would say, “Oh, that’s very simple: I can think of a reason why large numbers of people, including educated scientists, would says that there’s strong evidence for that even if there wasn’t, or even if they didn’t really know that there was: because they think they’re being asked something else, something about politics and freedom.”

Saving Humanity

A whole generation, maybe more than one, has been brought up to believe that belief in Darwinism is what stands between us and the Dark Ages. So if you like your iPad, if you like your car, if you like the freedom to say what you want and the ability to vote bad lawmakers out of office, then you should believe in — or at least earnestly profess belief in — Darwinian evolution. Because that’s what standing between us and and a return to the Dark Ages, or something even worse. Maybe something as bad as Nazism.

And this was subtly implied the whole time I was growing up. It was never stated directly — if it ever had been, I think a whole generation of people would have said, “Wait a minute. Is that true? What if that isn’t true?” But it was never stated; it was always just implied. When something is repeatedly implied, over and over, but hardly ever stated, then the message is: “This is so true that it doesn’t need to be directly stated. You’re crazy if you even think that this might not be true. Or at least, everybody is going to think you’re crazy. And they’re going to treat you as if you’re crazy. And they should.”