Confessions of an Oklahoma Evolutionist

I gave a presentation last Saturday afternoon in Tulsa. There were 35 people in attendance. It was every teacher’s dream. Not every lecturer’s dream: if your idea is that the audience will just passively absorb what you say, then this audience was not for you. But they were actively engaged in my presentation, and then asked questions for a half hour afterwards. While I think my presentation was good and had many valuable insights, the best part was clearly the audience discussion. In particular, I was not always the person to answer the question. I was ready for disagreement, but it turned out there was none. Convened by the Humanist Association of Tulsa, the audience seemed to consist mostly of Unitarians. But they were very knowledgeable people, including some who were retired scientists and science writers.

Briefly, my point was that evolutionists cannot ignore religion. Religion evolved and may be an instinct. Religion can be good or bad, and we should facilitate the good things and oppose the bad things. I focused on my own experiences, and those of my ancestors in Oklahoma. It was a very personal story, long on experiences and short on science, as appropriate for this audience. A PDF of the script from which I extemporized is at my website. The direct connection is here.

The audience brought up some interesting things to discuss. If I get a chance to post video clips from this session (which I will announce later), I hope to include some of the audience dynamics. One person wanted to know whether technology speeds up or slows down natural selection. Another wanted to know about the humanity and intelligence of the Neanderthals. Another wanted to discuss the origin of languages and the possible pivotal role of women in this process. While I had a lot to say from my extensive reading and writing on these topics, I was happy to defer to my wife, Lee Rice, who has studied and taught linguistics. She took a break from being a camera-person to leading a brief discussion. Thanks!

Julie Angle, on the education faculty at Oklahoma State University, was present, and whenever there was discussion of teaching evolution in Oklahoma, I was able to ask her to help. I said that if I have questions about science education, I would turn to her. I did not plan her presence; it was a lucky blessing. Thanks!

It is always a pleasure when a speaker, even one dressed up like Charles Darwin, can let the audience keep a good discussion going. I tend to be a control freak, but I have learned to deliberately let discussions take on a life and an evolutionary trajectory of their own.

Thanks to Larry Roth and the Humanist Association of Tulsa for sponsoring this event.

Darwin presentation in Tulsa on Saturday

Here is an announcement of my presentation in Tulsa on Saturday:

OESE president-elect Dr. Stanley Rice will give a presentation titled "Confessions of an Oklahoma Evolutionist: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" on Saturday, Feb. 16 in the Harmon Conference Room of the Genealogy Center at 2901 S. Harvard Ave. in Tulsa at 2:00 PM. For details, visit the Oklahoma Science Teachers Association online here.

But that the World Might Be Saved

According to John 3:17, God sent not His Son into the world to condemn the world but that the world through Him might be saved.

Well, if this is what God intended by “sending” Jesus, then it has been an utter failure. At least, according to conservative religious people. This is because the overwhelming majority of humans who have ever lived have not adhered to the strict set of religious beliefs that conservatives think are necessary for admission into heaven. And (see previous entry) it appears that a belief in the sanctity of gun ownership is one of those essential beliefs. According to conservative beliefs, liberal Christians (and apparently non-Republican Christians) will not be welcome in Heaven.

Therefore, for all eternity, there will be a relatively small number of people in Heaven (a few hundred million, perhaps) and uncounted billions in Hell. This would give God, who intended to save the world, a 99% failure rate.

Destroying the Fourth Dimension

The human species is unique in having the ability to store knowledge than any one brain can contain, and the ability to pass this knowledge on from one generation to the next, especially in the form of writing. This is one of our greatest evolutionary adaptations. It allows a fourth dimension of adaptation: time.

When religious extremists, of whatever variety, wish to brainwash people into following them, one of the things they sometimes do is to attempt to erase the knowledge of the past. Their message is clear: God’s work begins right now, with them, and whatever has gone before is irrelevant. The extremists present themselves as the sole and unprecedented source of God’s words and will.

This is nothing new. According to Edward Gibbon, Christian zealots destroyed the Library of Alexandria, the last and greatest collection of ancient writings. During the Reformation, Catholics destroyed Protestant books, Protestants destroyed Catholic books, and everybody destroyed Jewish books, along with the persons who read them. Nazis burned Jewish books. But we sometimes think that, in modern times, we no longer do this. But do you remember when, in 2009, the Amazing Grace Baptist Church in Canton, NC, planned to burn Bibles? They failed to get the necessary fire permit so they just tore them up instead. They wanted to destroy all versions of the Bible except the King James Version.

Just this past week, religious extremists struck again at the fourth dimension. Before fleeing Timbuktu, in Mali, Islamist militants set fire to as many as twenty thousand ancient manuscripts. The manuscripts were Muslim books and writings, but the militants were passionately convinced that nobody before them really knew what Allah wanted people to believe. They tried to erase the past and make people think that Allah’s words and will began with them. They claim to venerate Mohammed, but to them Mohammed is just a stick figure that they use to justify their own blasphemy.

Perhaps the main reason that no group of zealots has ever been able to wipe out all of the knowledge that preceded them is that this knowledge was widely distributed. Especially after the invention of the printing press, lots of copies of books were spread everywhere, and no one could track all of them down. I wonder if this might be changing. If all of our books are eventually released only online; and if the books themselves are not sold, but only the temporary right to read them; is it not possible that a centralized, religiously-crazy government could use the internet to destroy all copies of a book that they oppose? This sounds like a weird story for a dystopian future, but it may be closer to reality than we like to think. I have no doubt that, if they had this ability, the Islamist extremists in Mali would have destroyed all writings except their own interpretation of the Koran.

One of our main evolutionary adaptations is the distributed network of brains and books—interconnected, but independent.

Yes, Wayne, Absolutes Do Exist, But This is Not One of Them

According to a January 23 news release, National Rifle Association executive vice president Wayne LaPierre told a Weatherby Foundation awards ceremony that the Second Amendment gives Americans the unfettered right to own firearms. “Absolutes do exist, words do have specific meaning in language and in law,” he said. “No government gave them to us and no government can take them away.”

It is not clear from the news release what LaPierre was referring to when he said no government gave “them” to us. Did he mean that government did not give us the right to own firearms? If so, LaPierre is utterly and frighteningly wrong.

Absolutes do exist. The speed of light. The charge of the electron. In fact, a whole list of physical constants. But the right to own firearms is not an absolute. The federal government has, in fact, given us this right in the Second Amendment. But the Constitution provided a mechanism for amending the Constitution. Therefore the Constitution, and the Second Amendment thereto, are not absolutes.

Furthermore, there is no absolutely clear definition in the Second Amendment of what these “arms” are supposed to be. It is illegal to own nuclear weapons or missiles. Are these arms? It is illegal to use, and in most cases to own, machine guns. Even the NRA has not dared to call for the legalization of private ownership of machine guns and nuclear weapons. The right to bear arms is therefore limited, not absolute, even if you were to interpret the Second Amendment as an absolute commandment from God.

One could interpret arms, within the Second Amendment context, as whatever is necessary to maintain a militia. But we don’t have militias anymore. There are groups of people who think that the government is restricting their rights, for example, to polygamy. Does the Second Amendment give them the right to have arms to resist the federal government from enforcing laws against polygamy? Could not Warren Jeffs claim that the Second Amendment gives his followers the right to armed resistance? Would this be an example of a militia? And, if so, his followers could most certainly use machine guns and cannons and nuclear weapons to defend their compounds, since the Second Amendment does not prohibit them from doing so. I am sure this is not LaPierre’s interpretation. But he has told us that it is not a matter of interpretation. It is a matter of absolute truth.

LaPierre, and many NRA extremists (a term LaPierre rejects), are using absolutist terminology that is usually associated with religion. Conservative religious leaders consider all of their beliefs to be absolute, and that God has given them the right to enforce their religious beliefs on others. The NRA is promoting a new religion: the absolute right to bear arms, as absolute as God Himself. The absolute right to bear arms is not found in the Bible, by the way. Jesus said, “Put away your sword, Peter; for those who live by the sword will die by the sword.” But the NRA is promoting a new religion in place of Christianity. And, like many other religions, the NRA religion sways people to adhere to its claims with visceral emotion rather than with facts. I am not saying that gun-rights advocates have no facts; I am just saying that whatever facts they may have are irrelevant when LaPierre talks about “absolutes.”

The recurring habit of conservatives to call all of their beliefs “absolutes” and to give them cosmic religious authority is one of the reasons that I consider traditional religion to be dangerous.

The talk of “absolutes” has made reasonable dialogue impossible. From the NRA viewpoint, there are only two choices: unrestricted ownership of weapons vs. total helplessness. The NRA has not permitted any discussion of intermediate possibilities. For example, what about stun guns? Could those be used as an intermediate form of school protection? I know that stun guns have a very limited range. But at least they provide some protection without actually killing people. At close range, a teacher’s stun gun could incapacitate a school shooter and allow his gun to be confiscated and for him to be subdued. What would be the strengths and weaknesses of a school stun gun policy? I would be interested in hearing this. But there can be no such discussion so long as the NRA divides the issue into helplessness vs. a full armor of assault weapons. I might want to hear a discussion of some intermediate possibilities regarding gun ownership and restriction; but I do not believe I shall ever hear such a discussion.

This is exactly the same approach used by creationists. They claim that if you do not accept a young Earth then you are an atheist. The NRA says you either accept unrestricted availability of weapons or else total defenselessness. Nothing in between. They have insisted on absolutes: an absolute dividing line between darkness and light, as between sun and shadow on the Moon. But this is Earth, with twilights and dawns.

Critical Thinking Diminishes Religiosity: An Experiment

There was a most astonishing article in Science magazine on April 27, 2012 (page 493). I had my class of graduate students read it and try to pick it apart, but we have found no flaws in it. The authors make two claims. First, people who are inclined to think analytically also have less religious belief, based on surveys administered under lab conditions. This is not surprising

It is the second claim that caught my attention. People, regardless of their prior religious beliefs, displayed less religious thinking if they had been primed by exposure to analytical thought than if they had not been so exposed. What was the priming event? They looked at a picture of Rodin’s The Thinker. The control group looked at a picture of some other sculpture. A pre-test had established that looking at a picture of The Thinker improved a person’s ability to use logic and reasoning ability. But the experiment itself showed that it reduced their religiosity.

It is well known that theologians have less conservative beliefs than do preachers, and preachers harbor many doubts of which they do not tell their congregations. This is the whole point behind Bart Ehrman’s books: he appears to shatter much conventional Christian belief by merely telling us about things he learned in divinity school! Religion is, as Bernard of Clairvaux believed and Peter Abelard did not, something that you must not think about too much if it is to have a good hold on your mind.

A Christian Agnostic Christmas

Merry Christmas everyone. Christmas is a time that drives some atheists crazy. They go around raising objections to manger scenes within public view, or at least on public property, and they can never shield themselves from the music and imagery much of which is overtly religious. If religion makes you angry, Christmas is not very merry.

But I am just fine with Christmas. It is such a beautiful experience; if it did not exist, we would have to create it. It is basically an excuse for doing things we would consider too soft and fuzzy the rest of the year. For example, Christmas is a time when the arteries of altruism open up a little more (see my evolution blog entry for today). Christmas memes have been accumulating in our cultural gene pool for thousands of years, from a variety of sources: Christian (the nativity story), pagan (holly and yule logs), traditional (Santa Claus, despite the fact that some fundamentalists think Santa is actually a clever form of Satan; click here or here), and commercial. Even conservative Bible scholars will tell you Jesus was not born at Christmas; the shepherds would not have had their flocks outside at night in winter. Christmas is the Mass of Christ, invented by the Catholic Church to capitalize upon ancient pagan yule festivities.

Religion, which pervades Christmas, generally dulls the thought process (a topic for later), but if you can’t be a little muddle-headed at Christmas, when can you be? People go around yearning for a white Christmas, even though if they really get one it is a pain in the hypothermic butt. Think of Santa Claus having a heart attack while shoveling his walk. This is because the desire for a White Christmas is a feeling, not a policy. Taken together, these memes have passed the natural selection test, and no atheist crusaders can change that fact. Have some eggnog (unless, like me, you have diabetes) and relax.

I do not merely acquiesce to the religious content of Christmas, but actually like it. Most scholars know that the gospel nativity stories were made up, principally because they are absent from the oldest account (the gospel of Mark). But what image do these stories create? A baby Jesus in the manger, bringing joy to the world. This is a good image. It is much better than the ugly image of Jesus in the book of Revelation, with a sword coming out of his mouth and his horse trampling thousands of people into mires of blood.

What I don’t like is the commercialization of Christmas, especially the increasing trend of people giving gifts to themselves. But I deal with this by ignoring it. My wife and I will have a quiet Christmas with just a very few gifts around…oops, where is the tree? We have a cherimoya tree—does that count? We’ll enjoy one another’s company rather than spending money.

When my mother was growing up in rural Oklahoma in the 1920s, the Christmas tree was a cedar tree that Grandpa cut from the field and dragged in. They had very little money, so Christmas gifts consisted primarily of everyone (in the large family) getting an orange. Back then, oranges were hard to get in Oklahoma. But they needed something to alter the routine of farming and ranching. This is what the Ghost of Christmas Present showed to Scrooge—even people who had little could enjoy a spirit of candlelit warmth in the middle of winter.

Merry Christmas to all.