All is not lost in America. When George W Bush came out a couple of weeks ago in favour of teaching ”intelligent design” — the new manifestation of creationism — the press gave him a tremendous kicking. The Christian Taliban have not yet won.
But, they are gaining on us. So far there have been legislative attempts in 13 states to have intelligent design added to the school curriculum. In Kansas, Texas and Philadelphia, it already has a foot in the door. In April a new ”museum of Earth history” opened in Arkansas, which instructs visitors that ”dinosaurs and humans did coexist”, and that juvenile dinosaurs, though God forgot to mention it, hitched a ride on Noah’s Ark.
Similar museums are being built in Texas and Kentucky. About 45% of Americans, according to a Gallup poll last year, believe that ”human beings did not evolve, but instead were created by God … essentially in their current form about 10 000 years ago”.
The controversy fascinates me, partly because of its similarity to the dispute about climate change. Like the climate-change deniers, intelligent-design adherents cherry-pick the data that appears to support their case. They ask for evidence, then ignore it when it’s presented to them. They invoke a conspiracy to explain the scientific consensus and are unembarrassed by their own scientific illiteracy.
Why pick on Darwin?
It is surely because, as soon as you consider the implications, you must cease to believe that either Life or life are affected by purpose. As G Thomas Sharp, chairperson of the Creation Truth Foundation, admitted to the Chicago Tribune, ”If we lose Genesis as a legitimate scientific and historical explanation for man, then we lose the validity of Christianity. Period.”
We lose far more than that. Darwinian evolution tells us that we are incipient compost: assemblages of complex molecules that — for no greater purpose than to secure sources of energy against competing claims — have developed the ability to speculate. After a few score years, the molecules disaggregate and return whence they came. Period.
Is this not better than the awful lottery of judgement? Is eternal death not a happier prospect than eternal life? The atoms of which we are composed, which we have borrowed momentarily from the ecosphere, will be recycled until the universe collapses. This is our continuity, our eternity. Why should anyone want more?
Until recently I would have claimed that the demand for more was universal — that every society has or had its creation story. But on August 15 I read a study by the anthropologist Daniel Everett of the language of the Piraha people of the Brazilian Amazon, published in the latest edition of Current Anthropology.
Its findings could scarcely be more disturbing or more profound.
The Piraha, Everett reveals, possess ”the most complex verbal morphology I am aware of [and] are some of the brightest, pleasantest, most fun-loving people that I know”. Yet they have no numbers of any kind, no terms for quantification (such as all, each, every, most and some), no colour terms and no perfect tense. They have ”no creation stories or myths”. All this, Everett believes, can be explained by a single characteristic:
”Piraha culture constrains communication to non-abstract subjects which fall within the immediate experience of [the speaker]”. What can be discussed, in other words, is what has been seen. When it can no longer be perceived, it ceases, in this realm at least, to exist.
”Happy the hare at morning,” WH Auden wrote, ”for she cannot read/ The Hunter’s waking thoughts. Lucky the leaf/ Unable to predict the fall … But what shall man do, who can whistle tunes by heart,/ Know to the bar when death shall cut him short, like the cry of the shearwater?”
It seems to me that we are the happy ones. We, alone among organisms, perceive eternity, and know that the world will carry on without us. — Â