Who Am Us, Anyway, Part 1

I've been watching the religion/science debate for most of my life. The tide has gone both ways. When I was a child, every Wednesday a big semi-trailer came onto the parking lot of the school grounds. Inside the van was a chapel. We were marched out there at recess and preached to. I have no idea what denomination was being preached-- I was six at the time. I was familiar with Hell and Damnation preaching, however, since my Grandmother was a Baptist. This was in Southern California.

Later, the family moved to Huntsville. By this time, Madalyn Murray O'Hair had won her battle and prayers were not overtly allowed in school. The final expulsion of religion occurred later.

But there was still a preacher that lived next to the school and offered cookies to anyone who would come in listen to his sermons and sing his hymns. Free cookies? I was in. A big step up from the van.

Evolution was referred to by what it didn't do. Many of the same arguments that have been trotted out in front of the media in recent times were familiar discussions to me from back then. The watch/watchmaker argument. The missing links argument. The complexity argument. I heard them through Junior High, High School and into college.

What comes through continuously, once I learned to recognize it, was how all of these arguments derived from sheer human arrogance.

Not that religion is the only haven of arrogance. The claim of the Piltdown Man was that he was the earliest found man and he was English! The importance of the latter outweighed the former.

When I was studying invertebrate zoology in college, back just after the Cretaceous Extinction when we were still brushing the meteor ash off our textbooks, the Kingdom of Animalia was divided into two subkingdoms: Invertebrata and Vertebrata, as if by sanctifying one group with our presence we could deny the complexity and relationships of all groups not so sanctified. Some people still feel this way though it's been pretty much superseded by Bilateria and Radiata. (See the Taxonomicon).

I studied neurophysiology at the University of Missouri Veterinary School. We had to deal with the anatomy of many different vertebrates from snake to poultry, cow to cockatiel. The similarities were obvious. At that point, the anatomists there were in a state of simmering anger towards the human anatomists. The names of the different organs and vessels must be different when used for humans than for all other animals. Put a man in a box on all fours, and his superior vena cava became cephalic, inferior artery became caudal-- as it should be since all vertebrates bear the same stamp on our frame. But it could not be done. Again, arrogance that we did it in the first place and inertia that we do not change it.

This blind prejudice extended down into the cells. The term, "primitive", for example, means biologically only that an animal or feature has not changed much over the span of time being observed. It does not say anything about the quality of that animal or feature. Therefore, when we say a platypus is primitive, we mean that the animal has not changed much from when we presume it originated. Such lack of change must indicate that the animal has become sufficiently adapted to its niche that more change is of no selective advantage. Not that it is some misfit animal that only survived because it never had to compete with good Anglo stock.

The fact of the matter is that all existing lineages of metazoans have had pretty much the same span of existence on earth, about five hundred million years give or take. The single celled animals have been here considerably longer-- by some estimates nearly three billion years or about six times as long. What this means is that each organism has been selected against millions of times. There is no reason, for example, to suggest that the hoof of a horse is more or less advanced than the trunk of an elephant or the tentacle of an octopus or the brain of a human. In the case of mammals, many of the changes have been in the last fifty million years but the genetic lineage of mammals, fish, birds, amphibians and reptiles has been going on for much, much longer. Every organism is, in a very real sense, the sum of choices and consequences of its ancestors. It is folly and arrogance to think otherwise.

But such consideration puts human beings squarely adjacent to other animals. We become neither lords nor pawns of the animal kingdom but only colleagues. This clearly will not do.

So, humans change the meaning of evidence and understanding. Observed fact becomes suspect theory. The same people who are perfectly willing to look at the moon at night and turn on their electric heaters willfully deny the significance of the same rules, theories and laws when applied to something as close to their heart as evolution.

Let's make no mistake. Evolution is a threat to how some people view religion. Religion is a mechanism to determine a person's place in the world. It gives the dull power of sanctity to base desires. It places humans square at the top of creation. All religions do this whether it is reincarnation based religions (what defines a "lowly" animal after all?) to Christianity. A model of the universe where humans are not the center of creation, where humans are, in fact, almost incidental to creation, is anathema to religion.

Now, it turns out, that we actually are the center of the world-- the earth, anyway. Not by sacred contract but by right of force. We didn't start out being central to things but at this point, where we usurp as much as a quarter of the total biological output of the earth, we sure are now. No biota can possibly be safe without our sanction. No animal can survive for long without our determination that they be saved. Let's make no mistake about this: we run things. We are often thumb fingered, ignorant, idiots about it but by God we're in charge.

So, one might wonder, if we're so fully in charge, why do we need to justify it to ourselves? Why do we need any sort of supernatural blessing over what we do?

I think it's because deep down we realize that we're just upright monkeys. We need to feel like we're allowed to be in charge-- remember, it was not so very long ago that our ancestors went to sleep at night and were glad they didn't wake up just in time to know they were about to be leopard food. There were nasty things out there and we needed somebody on our side to keep them at bay.

We need permission to be arrogant.

Religion gives us the leave to think of ourselves as more than poncey little apes dancing around howling at the moon. We howl at Him instead. Or for Him, in time of war. Or in supplication to Him whenever we feel insecure.

But I think we've missed a bet here.

I think it is glaringly, scientifically true that we are more than our animal brethren. Not from some insight from the either. But from direct, scientific observation.

The same forces that made the hoof and the trunk also made our brain and like the hoof and the trunk it can be used for more than it was designed for. But brains work with the information of the world. They are the determining factor of understanding in the world. Because of this, the selective pressures that are applied to us are in fact different from many other animals.

We have developed an evolutionary system that is based not on the world as it is but the world how we imagine it to be. At some point in our evolution, evolutionary selection shifted away from pure survival, food and sex to intellectual games, social interaction, tool development-- which only became fixed in the population because reproductive success had grown beyond just food and survival. Now the same drives were used in other ways. Is this not the story of human existence? The way we use what we have in new and unexpected ways? That is, in fact, evolution. But at this point in our history, some indeterminate point in the past, we co-opted the clanking, hissing evolutionary machine to our own purposes.

At some point in the very recent past, we began to transcend our biology. Mechanisms we used to hunt food and have sex are now used to write blogs and type essays. The system has become self contained.

Personally, this is enough for me. I don't need some half-senile supernatural father figure to tell me I'm special in the world. I don't have to be arrogant to know that. I need no special sanction to make that distinction. Taking the train into work and watching television at night is sufficient.

But without the sanctified arrogance of religion, I must give secular meaning to that specialness. I must, in fact, come to terms with what I, as a human being, can do.

This is scary stuff. Without the buffered paternalism of religion, what we can do, what we have done, what we are still vulnerable to becomes very, very real. What is the meaning of the Indonesian tsunami if there is no God? What does it mean when generation after generation have left New Orleans ready to be raped by the rising water? If we have no one to blame but ourselves and random chance, how can we make sense of the world?

Recently, a study showed that humans co-opt close to a quarter of the productivity of the earth. Whether the world was built for man or not has become moot. It is built for man now.