In the fight between belief and science, an open mind should be the winner, writes Steve Jones
LAST week, an Australian judge intervened in a matter of belief. In the creation versus evolution debate, he took the side of the angels. Ian Plimer, a Melbourne geologist, faces huge costs for taking creationism to court – and losing. The case seems distant and the subject irrelevant. It is, though, essential.
Dr Allen Roberts, a fundamentalist with a degree in Christian education from Florida’s Freedom University, was seeking funds to excavate Noah’s Ark, recently found in eastern Turkey. Although his claim annoys Biblical literalists, who insist that it must be some miles away on Mount Ararat (not to speak of the predictable plaints of science that the object is a rock and not a boat), Roberts was keen to dig it up. Plimer claimed that Roberts had misled his backers and was hence breaking the Fair Trading Act. He lost, and may go bankrupt.
The Bench’s lofty judgment was that “some issues – no matter how great the passions they arouse – are more appropriately dealt with outside the courtroom.” Well, fine: except that the law cannot simply duck the clash between science and belief. Genetic engineering, human cloning, abortion – all deserve their day in court.
California’s civil code states: “Everything is deemed possible except that which is impossible in the nature of things.” The Institute of Creation Research sued the state – and won – for the right to grant degrees. Legal edicts on the scientific nature of things go back a long way.
In 1920s America, 50 pieces of legislation tried to stop the teaching of evolution. All failed. The believers are still trying to affirm their right to tell lies to children. Alabama demands that a note be pasted into textbooks: “This book may discuss evolution, a controversial theory some scientists give as a scientific explanation for the origin of living things, such as plants, animals and humans … No human was present when life first appeared on earth. Therefore, any statement about life’s origins should be considered as theory, not fact.”
Many biologists are concerned that such determined ignorance is winning. Admittedly, half of all American newspaper editors disagree that “dinosaurs and humans lived contemporaneously” – but what about the others?
In Europe the creation controversy is dead. Last year even the Pope gave up, grudgingly – he asserted only that “new knowledge leads us to recognise in the theory of evolution more than a hypothesis”. I have taught evolution to thousands of students, but not until a week ago did I get an exam script insisting that life began in 4004 BC (a six- millennial anniversary oddly ignored by the newspapers).
The theory of evolution is simple. It is “descent with modification” (which is exactly what cloning – descent without modification – is not). Parents produce offspring different from themselves, the differences are inherited and, inevitably, over the generations, life changes. Sometimes, evolution has a direction. A few of the altered lines of descent are better at copying themselves and, in time, they prevail. That is what natural selection is about, and that, in the end, is why we are all here.
Fundamentalists, however, believe in – even preach – every part of the theory, without noticing. This is for one simple and terrible reason: America has lived through an episode that has, with astonishing speed, laid bare the evolutionary arguments. The creature involved was unknown to Darwin. It is HIV, the Aids virus.
Even to creationists, Aids is proof of descent with modification because they can see it happening. The disease has changed in its 30-year history. How it did so retraces the past: the viruses of American patients are more similar to each other than are those from, say, Kenya. Even in a single body the virus changes as the illness progresses.
What is more, the HIV virus adapts by natural selection to overcome new treatments as they appear. Darwin would have been delighted. Fundamentalists are happy to use his mechanism to illustrate the wrath of God – but not the evolution of mankind.
Their problem comes because they overstate the limits of science. Unlike in America (where humourless literalism holds sway) the failure of creationism in Britain came because Christians were happy to define man as becoming human with the emergence of a soul that leaves no fossils and has no genes. No scientist could hope to identify it.
The debate about human cloning turns on the same moral issue. When does the embryo gain a soul? For fundamentalists (and for Clinton) the answer is simple and apparently scientific: it forms when sperm meets egg.
Naturally, the law is concerned with the rights of the unborn. Commissions have been much appointed. Most involve scientists, some eminent. There is, though, an oddity. No evolutionist would discuss when evolving Homo became human by gaining its crucial spiritual dimension. It is simply not a scientific issue. To claim that it is would be to fall into positions as stupid as those of creationism.
But biologists have been careless in their flirtations with theology, and biological research may now have to pay the price. There is much discussion of a new creature, the “pre-embryo” and of the unnatural nature of cloned humans (my mother, as it happens, is an identical twin). Why does anyone take them seriously? Certainly, science has a lot to say about when an embryo can survive outside the womb, or feel pain; but as to when it becomes human, forget it.
Both sides need to accept the boundaries of their own subject. For cloning (but not, alas, for creationism) there is still room for compromise.
I once worked at the University of Botswana. Many of the students were keen creationists. Even so, my evolution lectures went down well, and the exam was a model of accurate regurgitation. How, I asked, did that fit with their beliefs? The answer was masterly: “It’s simple, sir; you evolved, we were created!” If only those involved in the cloning debate were as open-minded.
Steve Jones, professor of genetics at University College London, is the author of Language of the Genes and In the Blood. He is currently working on a sequel to Darwin’s Origin of the Species