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Despite being an avid reader all my life, especially of biographies, I know very little about Charles Darwin. Growing up as Jehovah’s Witness, I think I unconsciously avoided reading about him and that oh-so-dangerous idea of evolution. But with 2009 being the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species, I think it’s time to learn a little more about Mr. Darwin.
He was born on the same day as Abraham Lincoln, February 12, 1809, and we share a name, as his middle name was Robert, after his father. He studied medicine, geology and for the ministry, but his first love would become natural history. It was certainly the voyage he made on the HMS Beagle shortly after his graduation from Cambridge that shaped Darwin’s life. What was intended as a two-year natural history exploration became a five year journey, and Darwin’s accounts of it in his published journals made him a popular science writer long before he published his theory. The Beagle journey provided the impetus and evidence from which he developed the concept of evolution and of natural selection as the process by which it occurs. Darwin would spend decades working on what would become On the Origin of Species, but he was certainly not the only scientist of his day coming to realize the importance of evolution. In fact it was receiving an essay on evolution in 1858 from Alfred Russel Wallace that moved Darwin to publish his findings the following year. While many Americans still question evolution, there is a full acceptance of the theory in the rest of the world. A National Public Radio program I was listening to earlier this morning noted that, while many Americans claim the Theory of Evolution is unproven and debatable, it is fully accepted in Europe and England, where Darwin is a huge national hero, buried at Westminster Abbey next to Isaac Newton, and that in the scientific community, evolution won the debate a long, long time ago. So why does survey after survey show that, among European and first world countries, 50 percent of Americans reject the science of evolution, whereas the vast majority of the rest of the world has no such problem? Why, when it comes to evolution, is America the equivalent of an illiterate, third world, backwater nation? Well, it’s been pretty clear throughout my lifetime that the US has constantly struggled to be a leader in math and science. Studies have often shown that scientific knowledge among the average population of Americans is abysmal, sort of like our lack when it comes to knowing geography or in the ability to speak more than one language. (One of my favorite jokes: What do you call someone who speaks three languages? Trilingual. What do you call someone who speaks two languages? Bilingual. What do you call someone who speaks one language? American.) Over the past year I’ve been reading about how the Jehovah’s Witnesses developed out of a tumultuous religious climate in the US starting around the 1820s and 1830s and continuing through most of the rest of that century, and I think there is a direct connection from the events of that time to our scientific ignorance today, especially when it comes to evolution. The great religious revival during the 1800s was based on a literal interpretation of the Bible and a belief in the imminent advent of Christ, and was strongly connected with conservative political ideals as well. Those years birthed any number of new religions, including Mormonism, the Seventh Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the massive Evangelical movement. While here in New England more liberal ideas gained ground with the emerging of the Transcendentalists like Thoreau and Emerson, religious fundamentalism and political conservatism took hold in the South and Mid-West, and remains a power to reckon with in those areas today. Overall, the United States remains in many ways a deeply fundamentalist religious nation, unlike Europe, Japan and other first world nations which never had the great religious revival of the 1800s. To the religious fundamentalist, science, and especially the science of evolution, is a huge threat. In fact, evolution essentially destroys a literal view of the Bible. There is no way around that. You may be able to maintain a belief in God, but science completely disproves a literal interpretation of Genesis and other parts of the Bible. So, to much of the population of the United States, science is a threat to their most basic and cherished beliefs, beliefs that can often be traced directly back to the religious revival of the 19th Century. If scientific education is not emphasized in this country, that is certainly part of the reason why. Religious fundamentalism leads to scientific ignorance, and the United States is a prime example of that. Thus, while Darwin is a national hero in England, school boards in the US still attempt to water down science curriculums by trying to introduce creationism, intelligent design and other fundamental religious concepts into the science classroom. I have no problem with the open discussion of intelligent design, it’s just that it needs to be done in religion, philosophy or mythology classes, not as a serious part of a science program where it has no place. Darwin won the evolution debate a couple of generations ago, and the rest of the world knows that. His work is the very basis for all the natural sciences, and those sciences continually increase the evidence for the fact of evolution. As Dr. Francis Collins of the Human Genome Project, and a firm believer in God, said, "Yes, evolution by descent from a common ancestor is clearly true. If there was any lingering doubt about the evidence from the fossil record, the study of DNA provides the strongest possible proof of our relatedness to all other living things." Thank you Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. We’ll do our best to keep you in the science classroom, where you belong. And Happy Birthday! RFS
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