Forget about Big ‘E’ Evolution for a Change

I’d like to somehow get past the primordial soup and monkeys for uncles and all those unimaginable millions of years and say something practical about evolution. I do think that science in the last few hundred years has come up with some explanations that can really help us understand who we are as a species. But how to get people to pay attention?

I realize that even that word, ‘species,’ seems to get some people’s hackles up, but I really would like to get outside of the mere controversy about people’s ultimate beliefs about ultimate things. Let me set aside, if I can, for a moment, all that vast expanse of time and space that came before or since ‘In the beginning …’ and state for the record that humans are astonishing beings. Our conscious awareness, our ability to calculate pi, all the beautiful and profound words and music we’ve produced, not to mention splitting atoms – we are indeed special. To say that we are created in the image of God might be one way of expressing that, I suppose.

And certainly God has been around for a long, long time. But whether God is the foundation of everything that now exists or a concept that has evolved alongside humanity is not my concern. And further, I don’t believe that resolving - or fighting over – which God is which is very useful. And I don’t see any good reason why my discussion of evolution needs to threaten anyone’s cherished metaphysical or theological ideas.

But there is a new worldview around that has something useful to say, some explanations that might help our self-understanding. I say ‘new’ in the sense that in all the thousands of years humans have written down our thoughts and ideas, these last few hundred years are something different. In a simplistic sense, humanity has gone from thinking about the world as a kerplunk! kind of place to a world that is in process. Kerplunk! may not be your first choice of words to describe the older view, but I think it is apt. And now the new view is one that says that with rigorous investigation we are now able to discover not just that something is what it is, but how it has become what it is. A ‘how’ worldview, if you will.

For me, it seems obvious that the material world operates according to natural laws over time. Whatever ideas about creation might mean to various people, I seriously doubt that God spread those layers upon layers of rock as if they were one flavor of icing on top of another with a cosmic spatula until they hardened – or that God simply blinked those rocks into existence just that way like I Dream of Jeanie. If nothing else – why would he?

I realize that it’s true that ‘process’ is something humans have recognized for a very long time, but we have in the last few hundred years only really begun putting the pieces more substantially together. I use the word ‘recently’ advisedly.

This scientific worldview has expanded thinking about many of the processes back millions of years – even billions. The only alternative I see to this massive time-frame shift is either to stay with a kerplunk! way of looking at things or to try to accept what the rocks and things are trying to tell us. If we stay with ‘blink’ as our answer, that pretty much means we now have to throw law and order out of the universe. Why should even gravity be a constant we can count on or water freeze solid enough to walk on at precisely 32 degrees Fahrenheit if we can constantly toss ‘blink’ in whenever we prefer?

To me, there seems to be no way around the ‘very long time’ idea. If we’re going to even say something as simple as that limestone is made out of the settled bodies of dead creatures with calcium in their skeletons who lived in very old seas that were then compressed into stone that’s as hard as rock it’s going to take calculable - but a lot - of time. Every physical thing in the universe becomes a willy-nilly proposition if we can’t even look at the Grand Canyon as a huge, complex example of the gradual small erosion that happens in a  bare field of soil after a series of thunderstorms.

I really think that it was a big mistake for some people to tie God’s hands to instants of time. But who or whatever God is, the linking of God to specific amounts of time is an idea that needs to be undone however unsettling that might be for some.

But I also think that with these newer ideas of evolution these shifts in thinking about time are not only unsettling for a few very religious folk. Although we are in a transition period in human thinking - and yes, some individuals have blithely stepped from one side to the other - we are, as a species, well entangled in kerplunk! kinds of thinking. Our individual lives are measured in decades. A million is not in anyone’s direct experience. The processes we actually see are not the same thing as all of that inexorable change over time. They’re only hints. It takes careful observation and inference before any human can imagine a coherent explanation for the present snapshot in front of us now. The universe exists in an almost unimaginable time-frame  for any of us – but that time is an essential concept if what we see around us to make sense.

Consider this: if evolution tells us nothing else, it’s that even scientists who don’t bat an eye at light-years and nanoseconds also share the same kind of mind with all of the rest of us. Whether it’s a creationist or an evolutionist walking alone on a dark night, when they hear a rustling in the bushes their brain will tell their heart to pick up its pace - the hackles on the back of their neck might stiffen.

The story of evolution is indeed that humans are directly related to all of the other species. We – for all of our rationality  –  we all are likely to act as if something might be there in the darkness -  something about to eat us. Even if it’s simply a dark night on a city street in which we are rationally likely to encounter a creature no more threatening than a wandering house cat and not a mountain lion – or even if you take a story, which some believe, in which they imagine it might be a spirit from a supernatural dimension in those bushes, I think that it makes sense that there is a reason that our human brain is the way that it is.

A process of becoming simply makes who we are now as this special species fit with our experiences. The simplest of common experiences shows that even in this modern millennium, our brain prepares our body to run for its life – for a reason. Unless, you’re determined to resorting to different kinds of supernatural magic that fill the world with false appearances of process – of processes that never actually were - it’s not that hard to trace that instinctive reaction to run back to something that is more complicated than kerplunk! thinking. But let’s let that one go, for a moment.

It is perhaps a little unsettling, if any of us thought hard about it,  for us to learn that it might be more than mere coincidence that we share DNA - chemical coding you can’t see with your naked eye, which determines so many of your physical characteristics - with a cat or an amoeba. That we might indeed be related to each other through long processes of change and long periods of time is not easily fathomable. Evolution is not a simple story although some parts can be told quite simply. And although I don’t think that religion needs to be entangled with these more basic scientific explanations, the human mind – as it has evolved, or as it was created to be, take your pick for now – our brain in fact tangles these kinds of things together quite naturally.

We are born, each of us, with a brain that has the instincts we see in other animals all around us. That should be unmistakable and it was to many people long before Darwin came along.

And we are each of us also born into a human culture that has come to imagine all sorts of ideas about how and why things are as they are. Some of those stories are simply wrong. But it takes conscious effort to sort through it all. Our brain is not a smooth crystal sphere the size of peach, nor is it a cube of metal and silicon that a kerplunk! creator could just as easily have decided upon. This folded, complicated, fleshy organism, with parts that do appear to come from here and there – that brain generally prefers taking things easy. Who has time for all that rational thought? Life goes on at the inexorable pace of time; we have a mate to find; children to beget; maybe we’d just like to go out for pizza and a movie; and now just look: human beings haven’t yet sorted everything out. But the problem becomes acute when I don’t like the way your tribe looks or thinks.

If we look around us, we will see that it is quite natural that human beings hold on to enough blurry or simply bad thinking that we miss out on some really interesting new stories - if only because we’ve been told that the new stories will undo some stories that we hold so dear.

And yes, science will in fact undo some stories – religious and otherwise – that have been around for a long time – because the new stories will turn out to be better stories – better explanations. I’m quite sure that many God stories will still stick around. And it’s also quite certain that religious stories and scientific stories will, on occasion, conflict.

But I’m pretty sure that reality won’t be undone by the different stories we humans tell. But however we got here, humans are prone to take their own tribe’s ideas much too seriously – even if they are right (although a definitive ruling eludes us). Furthermore, for being the most rational species on the planet, we frequently don’t use what reason we possess and instead simply call each other stupid – and then it gets worse.

Where does all this discord come from?

The God side broadly says our confusion comes from original sin. Evolution suggests that it’s something we inherited from our mother’s and our father’s side – from way, way, way back. There are some nuanced differences in the accounting, of course.

It’s not that I am simply saying that you should just listen to all sides. Some stories make more sense than others. Some tellers of stories have worked harder and more carefully at looking at life and the material world in the working out of their stories. That should count for something.  But at least you should be careful about excluding a story or parts of a story because of the way that it has gotten bundled in with certain other stories – that leave you naturally unsettled.

Whoever or whatever God turns out to be, the I Dream of Jeanie version – blink, kerplunk! - however you dress it up - when it comes to the natural universe, that part will turn out to be no more than a fairy tale.

And whatever else you think about that scientific hit, The Theory of Evolution, you’re going to want to pay attention to stories about long periods of time and processes that led to intricate relationships between a vast array of creatures through the many generations of life on the Earth.

There are some fascinating stories.  Whoever or whatever wrote the whole book of life and however far back it goes to marks the beginning, not everything can be rationally believed. That cuts several ways. Argue about ultimate origins if you want to, but look carefully at stories about processes and change over time. That’s the core of what evolution means. Start there, honestly, and see what you think.

History staring you in the face

You can’t blame the machines, the woman said, talking about one-ways and listers – plows - at Nerdy Dirty Thirties Night at Pachemamas. It was the practices.

Nerd Nite was packed with people, most of them perhaps around their thirties, talking back and forth, getting something to drink - and to hear presentations on the Dust Bowl. The startling photographs of clouds of roiling farmland about to engulf farmhouses and towns were on the screen. Equally startling was the fact, the woman said, that in fifteen short years, men walking behind horse-drawn, one bottom plows would be replaced by fossil fuel-powered multi-gang plows, although she pointed mostly to the gangs of plowshares on machines on the screen. And she was right, of course: thirty years into a new century, a wet period had turned to drought almost overnight – but, as she pointed out, anyone with an eye to history could have seen that cycle coming around, if the timing could not be not predicted precisely to coincide with the exposure of the land to the weather.

But If the plow wasn’t to blame, well then, what could they have been thinking? Another woman passed around a jar full of Dust Bowl dust, collected from buildings torn down from that long ago era. She mentioned water erosion in her talk about the art that followed those dirty thirties – and she had paintings and photographs to show. But none of them were scenes – not apparently startling or historical enough yet - of farmland flowing under the Kaw River bridge every minute, day after day, a few blocks from where we all coolly sat. She informed us that in Arabic there’s a word for dust storm, ‘haboob,’ and everybody laughed. What else can you do? The Dust Bowl is, after all, like water under the bridge.

But if John Deere gets the credit for innovating the moldboard plow – adding metal to the share so that it could cut deep into prairie soils - who does get the blame for the dust bowl? It was a relief to finally step into an unseasonably hot September night. The air-conditioning in Pachemamas had been set way too high. If there’s a Nerd Nite next century, will there be a woman showing photos of Carrier air-conditioners saying you couldn’t blame the machines, it was the practices. What could they have been thinking?

I walked home. I use best practices on my AC – 78 degrees, sometimes turned down to 76. What else am I going to do – sleep in a tent made from buffalo skins? I dreamt that there was a haboob on the horizon.