Cosmic Reflections

Abraham Lincoln was born on Charles Darwin’s birthday; Charles Darwin was born on Abraham Lincoln’s birthday: both came into the world on February 12, 1809.
      Two infants destined for infamy: I picture Lincoln focused backwards in time, called to clean up the mess left by our Founding Fathers over the issue of slavery;
     I see Darwin getting to pull together the emerging knowledge of the era and fling his fresh insights into the future.
     That some two hundred years later 40 % of Americans still don’t accept evolution as anything more than …’just a theory, kind of like gravity’… as a favorite bumper sticker puts it, never ceases to astonish, and yes, even appall, me!
    Of course, Valentine’s Day is also imminent, and I find it a delicious synchronicity that love and sexual reproduction are some of the most amazing elements of evolution!
    In the beginning, when organisms reproduced themselves by merely dividing, their lives went on forever and ever, dividing and re-dividing for all eternity. But when evolution called for more complex creatures, sexual reproduction came into play so that two beings could co-create a third, a separate, a whole other being. And then there had to evolve a way for the parents to make space for their offspring’s offspring’s offspring. Thus the parent organisms had to die.
     Death entered the world the partner of sex. And those among us still harboring the old mindset, whether about exploiting humans or denying evolution, will eventually die off!
     I suspect that this is the main impulse behind the persistent struggle to force courses on Creationism into school curricula to counteract evolution. But today’s children know in their bones that there’s a difference between beliefs and facts: witness any dinosaur exhibit, as Milt and I did up in Boulder one weekend. The towering creatures dwarfed the hoards of children milling about beneath their bones in rapt fascination! The footprints molded in sand and the fossil molds that became wax remnants to take home were proof positive. And injecting Intelligent Design into science classes will not inoculate the next generation from the truth.
     But casting doubt on science itself does have its payoff. This is deliberately being done by putting verifiable scientific data into the same category as social science, which is indeed open for interpretation. For instance, the ‘truth’ of the Civil War is perceived very differently through the eyes of the abolitionist reformer, the union soldier, the confederate soldier, the slave owner, the slave, the escaped female slave running the Underground Railroad, the President attending the theatre.
     So why do this? The ultimate question to ask is, as always, ‘what is the pay-off?’ Who’s making money? If you can doubt evolution and deny its evidence, you can also doubt, deny, and defy the science of climate change, and then we can all continue with ‘business (oil, gas, coal) as usual.’
     That we are also causing mass extinctions across the planet, wiping out species that took millions of years of evolution to produce, need not be on your radar screen if you are steeped in Intelligent Design that looks backwards from now, decides how things came to be, and accepts that the designer won’t destroy his handiwork (again).
     Disciples of Darwin, on the other hand, look back on what was, is now, and is yet in the process of becoming, and weep.
     But for anyone and everyone in love with life on this planet, the stark beauty of February can break your heart.