Dissent, Dogma and Darwin's Dog

By Philip Dunne

The welfare of any modern nation depends on its science and technology. U.S. industry, national defense, even health, rely on progress in fields such as geology, physics and genetics. Science implies scientists, who must be accurately taught. In schools and colleges, there can be no contamination of the teaching of science by irrelevant philosophies or prejudices, no matter how time honored these may be.

Earlier in this century, Soviet geneticist Trofim Lysenko severely damaged Soviet agriculture by forcing on his colleagues a pseudoscientific theory of heredity that was ideologically pleasing to the ruling Stalinists. Dissenters were dismissed, disgraced and even sent to the Gulags.

In the U.S. last November, the California board of education faltered under pressure from religious right-wingers and overruled the state's curriculum commission to alter a guideline for the teaching of evolution in California's schools. Darwinian evolution will no longer be presented as fact, but as both fact and theory, an equivocation pleasing to the religious right because few understand that to scientists "theory" is not a synonym for mere "hypothesis." Among other concessions, mention of a 1987 Supreme Court decision denying scientific status to so-called creation science will be deleted.

Right-wingers may be correct in claiming "a very significant victory." In a pale but disturbing analogue of the Lysenko affair, scientific judgments have been alloyed, if only slightly, with politico-religious dogma, creating / an unwelcome precedent for a nation that needs to stay even -- in some cases to catch up -- with its competitors. The camel's nose is now in the tent.

Since California is the leading purchaser of textbooks in the U.S., publishers could be economically motivated to spread these slippery equivocations nationwide, while extremists will be encouraged to increase pressures on educational authorities, including individual science teachers.

As a college freshman in 1925, I was sure that the Scopes trial, in which Clarence Darrow in effect made a monkey of William Jennings Bryan, had put an end to any serious debate. Even earlier, President Woodrow Wilson had confidently declared as much, and no important politician contradicted him, until, in 1980, presidential candidate Ronald Reagan won cheers from the religious right by announcing, "Evolution is only a theory" -- meaning, of course, a mere hypothesis.

Soon the argument attained a higher judicial level. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia with Chief Justice William Rehnquist, joining in dissent from the 1987 decision, cited testimony that "creation science" merits equal class time with Darwinian evolution as a competing theory of the origin of life.

Unfortunately, the testimony cited by the learned Justice and his Chief was in error, and this error has been allowed to skew the entire debate on the subject. There is no theory of life's origin in Darwin's work. True to his title, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Darwin confined himself to describing the process by which new species, including our own, have evolved from the old. In a letter to American botanist Asa Gray, he dismissed all theological pretensions on his part with the words: "A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton."

At the heart of the right-wingers' argument is their lingering hope that, as other generations believed, our species was singled out for a special creation in God's own image. They continue to insist that there are no transitional forms in the fossil record, no "missing links," though the Olduvai Gorge, along with other African sites, provides a procession of evolving hominids, mute but eloquent witnesses to our Darwinian past, including those children of the dawn, the australopithecines, the little "southern apes" who walked like men.

But none of that, pro or con, has a thing to do with theories of creation, or the origin of life on earth. In a sense, we are all creationists. We differ ! only on the specifics. The idea of linear time is so embedded in our consciousness that we instinctively believe there must have been a beginning, a creation, a genesis. But on what impulse, whose design? That we can never know.

The mystery of creation, as every real scientist is quick to admit, is not one that science is capable of solving. To some extent, we may learn how it happened, when it happened, but never why, any more than we can bound infinity or clock eternity. Neither scientists nor religious folk can know why the miracle we call life happened, how it acquired such characteristics as thought, a sense of beauty, hope, conscience, love, piety and speculation about itself and God.

We can neither prove God nor disprove him, whether he be Einstein's Old One, the architect of the cosmos, or Michelangelo's stern anthropomorphic censor of our morals. Many of us, including clerics of all faiths, think it unlikely that an all-wise creator would choose for himself the male form of a primate so close genetically to a chimpanzee that some taxonomists would include the pair in the same genus.

Models of creation -- the how but never the why -- abound among cosmologists, the most widely accepted being the Big Bang, which in no way forbids the existence of a creator who might have touched it off. One recent hypothesis holds that our universe was born as a microscopic ripple in a perfect vacuum, not so very new an idea, since Thomas Aquinas proposed something similar seven centuries ago. Although the good saint was never excommunicated for such heretical views, he was under constant fire from zealots as a sort of premature secular humanist.

And even if he were proved right, the next question that would occur to scientists and theologians alike -- and perhaps even to Darwin's dog -- would be: Who or what created that fruitful vacuum?