The Evolution Catechism BY ADAM GOPNIK
Darwin Day, February 12th, passed last week without much
fuss, even from those of us who have written at
length about the man it honors. Celebrating Charles Darwin’s birthday
has some of the vibe of Linus waiting for the Great Pumpkin—there’s a hope, and
a ritual, but it can be pretty lonely. There was, however, one striking sort of
counter-ceremony: the Wisconsin governor and would-be Republican Presidential
candidate Scott Walker, asked, in London, if he “believed in evolution,” took a
pass. “I’m going to punt on that one as well,” he said. “That’s a question
a politician shouldn’t be involved in one way or the other.”
It does seem slightly odd to ask a man
running for President—or, for that matter, for dogcatcher—to recite a
catechism on modern science. It somehow puts one in mind of the stern and
classic catechism of the Catholic Church, and the questions posed,
in memorably ironic form, in “The Godfather,” when Michael Corleone
attends his godson’s christening even as his boys are killing the heads of
rival families. The priest asks, “Do you renounce Satan … and all his works?”
Michael responds, “I do renounce them,” even as he doesn’t. One hears a British
voice similarly demanding such things of American politicians: “Do you believe
in an expanding universe with a strong inflationary instance in the first
micro-seconds?” “I do so believe.”
But the notion that the evolution question was unfair, or
irrelevant, or simply a “sorting” device designed to expose a politician as
belonging to one cultural club or another, is finally ridiculous. For the real
point is that evolution is not, like the Great Pumpkin, something one can
or cannot “believe” in. It just is—a fact certain, the strongest
and most resilient explanation of the development of life on Earth that there
has ever been. And yet, as the Times noted, after Walker’s
London catechism, “none of the likely Republican candidates for 2016 seem to be
convinced. Former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida said it should not be taught in
schools. Former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas is an outright skeptic. Senator
Ted Cruz of Texas will not talk about it. When asked, in 2001, what he thought
of the theory, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey said, ‘None of your business.’
”
What the question means, and why it matters, is plain: Do
you have the courage to embrace an inarguable and obvious truth when it might
cost you something to do so? A politician who fails this test is not
high-minded or neutral; he or she is just craven, and shouldn’t be trusted with
power. This catechism’s purpose—perhaps unfair in its form, but essential in
its signal—is to ask, Do you stand with reason and evidence sufficiently to
anger people among your allies who don’t?
Darwinism, or evolutionary biology, is true in the complex
sense that scientific theories always are—not fixed in its particulars,
immutable and imposing, but rich, changing, and evermore explanatory. (There
are evolutionary biologists who protest against the simple “Darwinism” label,
against “branding” it like a single-barrel Bourbon, but movement names tend to
be taken, not chosen.) Evolution may be hard to accept, but it’s easy to
understand. All the available evidence collected within the past hundred and
fifty years is strongly in its favor, and no evidence argues that it is in any
significant way false. Life on Earth proceeds through the gradual process of
variation and selection, with the struggle for existence shaping its forms.
Nobody got here all in one piece; we arrived in bits and were made up
willy-nilly, not by the divine designer but by the tinkering of time.
There were not enough fossils in Darwin’s own lifetime to do
more than offer a hunch about what they’d show, but the fossils unearthed since
show that Darwin’s hunches were right—particularly about the evolution of man
from early primates, which turns out to be confirmed by a particularly dense
and eloquent sequence of skulls and skeletons. There was no genetic evidence
when Darwin wrote, but all the genetic evidence that came after not only fits
the evolutionary scheme but helps to explain its mechanisms. The DNA evidence,
indeed, slips into the fossil evidence seamlessly. Darwinism is easily
falsified, and it has survived every possible test. That’s a good theory—it
rises above the pumpkin patch and beams right down.
While there is no debate about Darwinian theory, there are
endless debates within Darwinian theory. The controversies are loud and real:
Are the mutations offered up to selection always truly random, or could they be
in some ways pre-winnowed? How gradual does “gradual” have to be? Is everything
we find in an animal an adaptation, or does simple genetic drift and accident
account for some part of biological change? There is always a controversy, in
that sense, because science is an organized controversy, a self-correcting
debate. Controversy is what Darwin wanted to start, and did...
