Forget Darwin

My last post took a pretty hard swipe at science, so in the interests of balance I want to take hold now of the other horn of the contemporary culture-wars bull.

The term “fundamentalist” was invented by conservative Christians in the late 19th century as a self-description intended to identify themselves as the true bearers of the real principles of the uniquely true religion. Part of their self-conception was the claim that they were merely carrying forward ideas that were “fundamental” to Christianity from its beginning.

This claim is false, of course, because they were parsing their scriptural sources in an anachronistic way to come up with answers to the challenges raised in their own times. The concerns of the people who wrote the Bible were not the same as the concerns of late-19th-century Christian pastors, who were mainly appalled by the then-new doctrine of “Darwinism.”

What the original fundamentalists were responding to, however, was not just Darwinism but “modernism” in general, including especially the text-critical and historical-critical approaches to Bible scholarship. Studies in these disciplines had severely undermined a naïve belief in the Bible as “the Word of God,” and in many ways this was a more exigent challenge to faith than the findings of physical science.

Darwin’s theory, however, hit people on a more emotional level than arguments about source-texts and exogenous influences. On a gut level, many people just didn’t like the idea that they were cousins of chimpanzees. And we are still dealing with that reaction.

Scientists and their groupies are of course endlessly exasperated by all this. As far as they’re concerned, the theory of the origin of species through natural selection is “settled science,” and everyone should just accept it and get over it. And they’re probably right, though some of them seem inclined to extend this hypothesis to cover matters far beyond the biological where its applicability seems very dubious, as in the logically and morally questionable doctrines of Social Darwinism.

However, the ongoing argument over Darwin vs. the Bible or Darwin vs. God, though it seems to provide people on both sides with some sort of pleasure, is ultimately misconceived.

Even the most fundamentalistically inclined televangelist makes use every day of the theories and discoveries of physics: Their pleas for money are beamed to homes around the world by way of radio waves to satellites in Earth orbit and back again to the TV receivers of their fans. And every step of the way, their broadcasts rely on the laws of motion and electromagnetism and relativity and so on that were discovered and described by science.

For anyone with the slightest intellectual integrity, there’s a hair-raising degree of self-contradiction in this: Fundamentalist preachers are taking advantage of the discoveries of physics to broadcast the message that physics is a lie.

All the quibbling about how to interpret the age of bones and why there are seashells on top of the Alps pales into insignificance when someone asks why we’re able to see stars and galaxies that are millions or billions of light-years away.

From Newton to today, science has discovered the laws of motion and gravity, the values of universal constants like the speed of light, the ways in which bits of matter and energy interact, and so on and so on. Even if science hasn’t come up with a convincing explanation of why all these things are what they are, it’s undeniable that it has come up with stuff that works. Any quibbles one might have about the details of quantum theory seem largely irrelevant if you’re talking with a resident of Hiroshima.

Fundamentalists need to forget Darwin and worry instead about Newton and Faraday and Einstein and Niels Bohr and the rest. They need to explain how the very same science that enables them to generate electromagnetic signals and put satellites into Earth orbit and draw electricity from nuclear generators is wrong about the size and age of the universe.

After all, we can see objects in the sky that, based on measurements using the same physics that enable them to broadcast their appeals for money, are millions or billions of light-years away, when, according to their supposedly Bible-based belief, the universe is only several thousand years old.

This leaves us with only two options: One is that every object in the sky is within 6,000 to around 10,000 light years of Earth, and only appears falsely to be farther away. But this means that all the matter in the universe is contained within a space with a radius of roughly 10,000 light years; based on the laws of physics, it all should have collapsed into a black hole long ago.

The other option, and the one that fundamentalists tend to fall back on whenever challenged, is that it’s all a “test of faith.” God created the universe on that fateful day in October of 4004 B.C. (or some other day, but within the past tens of thousands of years), and when he did, he scattered the stars and galaxies across the sky in such a way as to make us believe that they were farther away and older than they really are.

This is the one that really bothers me, because it says that God is a liar and the whole fabric of the universe is a deception. It says that no one who is not a human being on this one planet, Earth, can ever know the truth about existence, because it’s only here that we have this book, this Bible, that explains the hidden truth behind the falsehood that is the universe.

That is the real “fundamental” idea: Challenged by serious and thoughtful investigators of life, the universe and everything, a certain group of Christian pastors decided that the answer was to declare the Bible unarguably true and everything that contradicted it false.

But before conservative Christians invented fundamentalism, even before there was such a thing as Christianity, there were many who understood that the universe was much more “the Word of God” than anything written down in ink. We talk about trees being chopped down to make paper for books; one living tree tells as much truth as all the books ever written.

Howdy, Cousin

Our culture is so conditioned to the idea that a society is formed by the voluntary association of individuals that it may come as an actual shock to some people to learn that there are alternative models of social formation. In fact, as I think everyone realizes deep down, the original mode of social organization was kinship. And this remained the dominant mode until very recent times, by way of a series of extensions or expansions: from family to clan to tribe to nation, with accompanying formalizations of relationship and status, reaching a peak of elaboration in the kind of hierarchical society exemplified by, say, the court of Louis XVI.

Now, I'm not going to argue that humanity's needs would best be met by a return to monarchy and hierarchy. But I am going to suggest that something of real value is lost in the current atomistic-individualistic view of things. In the understandable rejection of tyrannical absolutism, we’ve gone a bit too far in the opposite direction. One way of looking at it: In the famous revolutionary triad of "Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité," the present-day view seems to regard them as listed in descending order of value; indeed, "fraternité" seems largely to have gone off the radar in our hyper-competitive, social-Darwinist era.

The fact that we humans really are all members of one big family can be illustrated by something I’ve been mulling over recently:

Every human being has two parents. You have two parents, your parents had two parents each, giving you four grandparents, each of whom had two parents, giving you eight great-grandparents, and so on. So in looking back at your ancestry, the number of your ancestors doubles with each generation further back you look.

There's a conundrum here. At this geometric rate of expansion, by the time you get back to your 28-times-great grandparents, you've got a billion ancestors in that one generation. Allowing 20-30 years per generation, that would have been the situation somewhere between 600 and 900 years ago, i.e., sometime between the years 1100 and 1400. But according to experts' best estimates, the total human population didn't reach 1 billion until the early 1800s. And the disparity just gets bigger as you keep counting backwards: If you go back a further 30 generations, the number of your ancestors in that one generation rises to a staggering 1.2 quintillion; meanwhile, the actual population on Earth has shrunk to an estimated 200 million.

So how can we reconcile the obvious truth that everyone has two parents with the equally obvious truth that the human population gets smaller the further back in time we look? I think there's only one explanation: Among those theoretical 1 billion or 1.2 quintillion people, there's a lot of duplication. In other words, the same couples appear multiple times in a given generation, making them your ancestors along multiple lines of descent.

Suppose, for instance, you lived in the 15th-century and your father hiked 20 miles to a (to him) distant village to find his bride. Well, there's a fair chance that his great-great-great grandfather did the same thing in the opposite direction. So your father might have ended up marrying his fourth cousin, and you would have the same 4-times-great grandparents on both your mother's and your father's side – which, incidentally, would make you your own fifth cousin.

What this boils down to is that when you're standing in line at the grocery store, there's a pretty good chance that the cashier or some of the other people in line are your not-terribly-distant cousins. And if you don't believe a more or less random selection of people can turn up these kinds of family connections, recall that during the 2008 presidential campaign, the genealogical experts at Burke's Peerage informed the world that Barack Obama is an 11th cousin of George W. Bush and a ninth cousin of Dick Cheney.

Everyone is aware that all humans are related on the basis of the so-called "mitochondrial Eve" or whatever, but that kind of connection goes back tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years, so it may seem pretty remote and not very relevant to our lives today. But it turns out not to be necessary to look back anywhere near that far to see how connected we are, how closely related we all are.

Regrettably, in an age when social atomism has reached such an extreme that even the nuclear family seems increasingly fissile, it may not matter much to a lot of people to be reminded of their kinship with strangers; they’re already used to treating members of their immediate family like strangers. One way of looking at this spreading alienation is as an increasing narrowing of our horizon of interest or concern: from all humankind to our close kin to, finally, our singular personal selves.

It's an even more drastic narrowing of horizons if one looks at it from an even wider perspective than the merely human, as I want to do next time.