Monkey Business

A particular debate in this nation is starting to gather more steam, getting more and more recognition from the corporate media in this country...and I'm actually embarrassed anyone would even have to write about it.

The current hot button topic across small, conservative-red, miniature flag-waving American towns? Evolution.

This particular discussion shows that no, not all debate is healthy, because sometimes it's often embarrassing convincing people outside the scientific community that the case we all thought was closed after the 1925 Scopes trial should really still be closed. The scientists - you know, the people who went to school for years and spend most of their lives researching stuff, and providing facts that prove things - are actually having to engage the conservative religious community in debate at school board meetings, in front of city councils, or anywhere else they are confronted by these knuckle-draggers (pardon the pun, because of course we all evolved from knuckle-dragging beings.)

Those on the Right have taken a cue from our...let me try to force myself to type the word here...President, who stuck his middle finger up at the scholastic community by saying the jury is still out on evolution. I think the quote was something like, "well, gull-dang it, I sure as heck dunno how we got here, but I do know Jesus created all of us and that's all I have to say about that, now excuse me while I drop a bomb on the Museum of Science in Boston."

That's right. The guy who scored enough legacy points to drink and snort his C-minus average self through Yale, isn't quite so sure if the millions of scientific publications, research, discovered fossils, museums, and entire scientific community should be believed over, "says so right in this here Bible."

Bush and others in the anti-science crowd know they can't argue on their own merits - they cannot use education, research, or anything resembling scientific fact to provide their own theory to account for how humans just "appeared," and they realize that simply arguing against well established theories like evolution, relativity, and gravity make them look - well, retarded. So instead, they've done two things: 1). they're organizing and raising money to fight this fancy book-learnin', and 2). they're developed their own "theory," called Intelligent Design.

The first method is a bit scary when you see the numbers. The nonprofit Discovery Institute in Seattle has spent a million bucks annually to try to promote their scowling, anti-evolution theories. Evangelist James Kennedy (I know what you're thinking! No, no relation) has established a Creation Studies institute in Florida costing millions of dollars, and Jerry Falwel's evil petri dish, Liberty University in Virginia, has established a conference called "Answers in Genesis," which has raised (are you sitting down?) nine million dollars. Nine MILLION Dollars. Nine million that could have been donated to rebuild tsunami-flattened villages in Asia, help develop an AIDS vaccine, or could have been neatly piled, lit on fire and inhaled - all three of which would have been far better utilization of that much money.

The second method they're using to combat evolution, Intelligent Design, is a more modern development that is exciting the South more than a pig roast in cousin Zeke's bath tub on the front lawn. Intelligent design is the new creationism baby! It's a theory that is supposed to provide empirical proof for the existence of God, and show that natural selection is not really natural selection but instead the direct result of a white-bearded God in the sky moving our adaptations and DNA around like a chess game.

While many evangelists, preachers, and soccer moms are foaming at the mouth (via salivary glands evolved to help us digest food and therefore survive the past several million years) at the thought of being able to challenge evolution, their theory has several obvious flaws:

- People who support Creationism or Intelligent Design say that science has been wrong in the past. While this is true, only one thing has been able to prove scientific theories invalid over the course of it's history: more science. Think about it. When the earth was hypothesized to be flat rather than round, it was a scientist who stood up and said, "no, actually, I've got some data that proves you wrong." When we thought the Earth was the center of the Solar System, it was Galileo, under threat of death, who invited people to look through his telescope so people could see for themselves how wrong they were - or at the maid bathing next door. Later it was science that proved that women weren't sinking or floating in lakes due to supernatural proof that they were witches, but rather because of buoyancy properties in the human body. In other words - when science is proven incorrect, it's due to more science, and the same can be said for supernatural theories when they are proved wrong.

- When Creationists say that evolution is just a theory, they're intending the word theory to be synonymous with guess. Scientific theories are not developed by simply "taking a stab at it," they're actually based on years of research, study, and real world application. There are many other scientific theories today that are widely accepted as more than just a stab in the dark. For example - as you read this, you are not flying off your chair straight up into space infinitely. We explain this with what we've learned from the theories of gravity, rather than saying "God is holding everything down with His magic fingers." NASA uses the theory of relativity in their work daily (the famous E=MC2, where m = mass and c = the speed of light), and wouldn't really call this theory just a hunch. In fact, it was this scientific theory that further expended on Newton's laws of motion.

- The book of Genesis, while well written from a literary standpoint, is just that - it's a story. It's a story written by men 2 millennia ago in order to convince people of something. Scientific theories are there for everyone to examine, prove, disprove with better science, and overall further the field of science, understanding, and our world around us.

- By contrast, the Biblical tales of Adam and Eve are there to explain what people thousands of years ago could not explain, and to teach moral lessons, like women are inferior because the come from men's ribs.

Basically, what it all boils down to is this. People advocating creationism or intelligent design have absolutely no intention of contributing to science for the good of anyone. The whole thing centers around the need for the Christian Right to interject religious teachings into public schools. Bear in mind that Creationism and other entertaining stories can be told and sold to children in any other forum - at Church, at home, and in private schools. When it comes to education of our citizens, I think we should all do our part to make our kids' science education a little less vulnerable to the rest of the world pointing and laughing.