You Tell Me That It's Evolution

Well...you know...

This will be a blog post about the Kansas Board of Education and how they want science teachers to have to instruct students about "intelligent design." As such, it will be filled with a good deal of the following:

• Mild profanity
• Not mild profanity
• Authoritative writing about science education from a guy who regularly failed high school chemistry exams
• Fundamentalist-baiting
• The implication that, yes, douchebag, you really are related to a monkey...deal with it...

So, if that's gonna stick in your craw, why not check out some movie reviews? Or, better yet, go read Zach Braff's blog. I hear he directed some movie that he's trying to promote.

Okay, so back to Kansas v. Common Sense and Reason.

A 6-4 voting majority of the Kansas State Board of Education wants to force high school science teachers to deal with "intelligent design." What is intelligent design? It's a code word for creationism. It's basically the philosophy that the world is so durn complex, it must have required a God or some similar intelligent being to create it. Because nothing this complicated could have come about on its own.

You're probably expecting a high degree of snark from me here, but you're not going to get it, because I don't think intelligent design is inherently that dumb of an idea. Now, bear with me, here...I don't personally believe in any God at all. I think it's unexplainable how matter came to be in the first place, but once that matter existed, and you have an infinite timeline for it to develop, anything is possible, including human life on Earth.

But if you believe that it's not possible without some sort of God thing, hey, go for it. I don't think that makes you an idiot or that it's not a reasonable-enough thing to believe. I just don't happen to subscribe to your theory.

It's something that makes "irrational sense." You get what I mean? It's like, most things we see and experience make rational sense. If I drop a ball, it will fall to the ground because of gravity. Water evaporates into the atmosphere, forms clouds, which then grow dense and saturated and spill rain water back into streams and rivers, where it then funnels back into the ocean and re-evaporates. Right? Rational, reasonable, logical, verifiable sense.

But there are things about the universe that make irrational sense as well. Things like Murphy's Law. When there is the potential for something unfortunate to happen, it usually happens. There's no way to prove that, it's not something scientifically observable, but anyone who has tried to get to a movie when you're running a few minutes late will tell you...all kinds of things are going to happen on the way to that theater to make success unlikely. That's why we have a cliche for it: Murphy's Law.

Also, let's take anxiety and panic disorder. I'm occasionally prone to anxiety attacks, as are millions of other neurotic, somewhat excitable Americans. Now, when you're having an anxiety attack, the properties of the world around you seem to shift. Everyone seems less friendly, every task seems more arduous, and every minute seems to linger for an hour. In short, things stop making rational sense. You begin to behave irrationally.

And that doesn't mean there's no room for your experience, or that you're deranged or in need of medical assistance. It just means that you've ceased to function on an entirely rational level, and are instead dependant on irrational reasoning.

I don't think we need to outlaw irrationality. It's just that you can't teach it. Teaching kids things you believe instinctually but have no proof for (like that a God created the world) don't have a place in school. You need to teach kids the stuff we know for sure, and let them figure out how to interpret the mysteries on their own.

Which brings us back to the evolution-intelligent design debate.

Let me be perfectly clear...The school board in Kansas is not having a philosophical debate about whether or not it is healthy to tell kids about the variety of interpretations of the descent of man. They are stupid fundamentalist/theocratic yahoos who want to impose their bullshit religious doctrine on innocent Kansas schoolchildren. Okay? Despite the mild ecumenism voiced above, I think that stuff is ridiculous and un-American.

But the thing about it that I don't get is the religious hatred of all things evolutionary. I mean, if Darwin's theory had a syllogism about there not being a God, if it represented the ultimate atheist philosophy, I could see parents getting all fired up about teaching it in school. But it doesn't. It doesn't really have any attitude about whether there is a God. It just relates the process by which life on Earth develops.

Evolution requires a single-celled organism to get started. There's no theory beyond that. It says that at first there were single-celled organisms, and over time they mutated and became more complex, until they formed into algae and bacteria, and then plants, and then simple animals, and then more complex animals, and finally people. It doesn't say these cells appeared out of nowhere. Who knows? Maybe a God created them.

I mean, Darwin famously believed in God, right? He didn't think the theory he'd developed meant that human beings were all alone in the universe. Maybe he just figured out God's plan for the development of the human race. I mean, Genesis says "And God Created Man," but it doesn't say how. (Oh, sure, it says he molded him out of clay, but that's obviously metaphorical. I mean, we're not made of clay, we're made of flesh and bone). Maybe he created algae and then he created the concept of mutation, so that algae could become man.

When you think about it, evolution itself is kind of spiritual. It says that we're all connected, human beings are in the same family with every other form of life on Earth. Isn't that what all this religious stuff's about anyway? A "culture of life," in which we recognize that all the phenomenon of the world derives from a single source of power and energy?

So, really, the debate in Kansas makes no sense. Intelligent design and evolution can easily co-exist (though they obviously shouldn't in public schools) and the religious nutjobs just want to win this case in order to win one for their side. It's all about getting them one step closer to what they really want, which is total domination of American culture and life by super-religious Christian zealots. Don't believe me? Check out this quote from Salon:

A principal aim of the creationists is to scrub the definition of "science" from Kansas classrooms -- now described as "human activity of systematically seeking natural explanations" for phenomena -- and to replace it with a more general definition lacking the words "natural explanations." If that sounds like an innocuous change -- well, that's the aim. By removing the notion of "natural explanations" as part of science, the creationists aim to give religion a foothold in the classroom, in the name of scientific balance.

Evolution is just the first step in this process. They want to overtake the very definition of science in order to better suit their fascist ends.