Emails from Hell, part fourteen.

{beginning of email}

            As I walked along with Andrew, I asked him if there were any more important people I should meet down here in Hell.

            “Don’t get in such a hurry,” he said to me. “What part of forever do you not get?”

            “Sorry, but I was just asking.”

            “Well, here’s one now,” said Andrew.

            I saw a white man with a white beard. He sat at a table and looked into a microscope. He was dressed in nineteenth-century garb and his microscope looked pretty old. We approached him.

            “Oh, yes!” the man said in a weak voice. “Oh, look at that, will you!” He looked up at us as if he actually expected us to look. So we did.

            “Yuk,” I said. “What is that?” It was a little bit of flesh in a small depression slide. It looked like a miniature version of a chicken gizzard that got bile fluid spilled on it by a careless butcher.

            “That, sir, is a barnacle. And it is my favorite barnacle! What’s your favorite barnacle?”

            Since the old man actually expected me to answer, I said, “Barnacle Bill.”

            “I haven’t met him,” said the man. “But this one! This barnacle shocked the living daylights out of my fellow Victorians, and I don’t mean maybe. This is a female barnacle—you can see the little jointed legs—but the male barnacle has degenerated into a little parasitic lump on her side. He has degenerated so much that there is almost nothing left of him except the penis. It sounds sort of like my brother Erasmus. He just wanted to have fun with the women all the time.”

            “So, sir,” I said, “Who are you?”

            “I was the first man to bring an orderly classification system to the Cirripedia—that is, to the barnacles!” He smiled. “An evolutionary classification system,” he added.

            “Tell him what else you did,” said Andrew.

            “I also wrote the Origin of Species,” said the quiet old man.

            “You’re Charles Darwin!” I exclaimed. “Guess I’m not surprised to see you here. You shot God right out of the sky with your theory of evolution!”

            “Yes, well,” said Darwin. “I wasn’t trying to come here. I wasn’t trying to shoot God out of the sky. I wasn’t trying to upset anybody, particularly not my quiet and pious wife Emma. But, man, I couldn’t help it!” He stood up from the table. “In the Origin of Species, I explained how natural selection works. It is not my fault that natural selection occurs everywhere, all the time, with everything, not just organisms. Natural selection occurs even in languages, ideas, and technology. You can’t stop it! The best organisms, ideas, and technology always come to dominate the resource space.

            “I very much regret that this upset so many people,” Darwin continued. He said quietly, “Especially Emma.” Then he spoke loudly, or what passed for loudly in his weak voice. “But they were even more upset when I explained that a lot of evolution was due not to natural selection but to sexual selection. Male birds have colorful feathers because female birds choose them, and all that. Many of my fellow Victorians didn’t even want to hear the word sexual. I didn’t mean to upset them. I would much rather sit around the mansion—and I had a pretty good one—studying orchids and pigeons.”

            “And barnacles,” I said. “The religious conservatives depicted you as some kind of monster. But I can see you are one of the nicest, and gentlest, people I have ever met.”

            “Except for Philomena,” said Stonewall, who had approached us, arm in arm with the former history teacher.

            “Some people,” explained Andrew, “used Darwin’s theories to justify slavery.” He looked into the eyes of Philomena, who had been black when she was alive.

            “We used creationism to justify slavery,” said Stonewall, who had been very very very white.

            “Well, racists will use whatever they can, such as either creation or evolution, to justify oppression,” said Andrew.

            “And that,” said Darwin, “is what makes me angrier than anything I ever experienced. While I was on Earth, I was an outspoken critic of slavery. My whole family—and Emma’s—denounced slavery, and tried our best to not invest in it. Investing in it, while denouncing it, is miserable hypocrisy…”

            “Amen, bro,” said Stonewall.

            We left Mr. Darwin, promising to come by and talk with him some more.

{end of email}

Darwin, Animals, and Religion

I just posted a new Darwin video. In this video, Darwin explains that the monotheistic religions evolved in parts of the world where the largest and most noticeable animals were livestock, which have been bred to be stupid. Understandably, people in these regions saw a vast gulf between humans and animals, and thought of themselves more like gods than like animals. But in regions of the Earth where people encountered disturbingly intelligent primates, especially monkeys and apes, they tended to think of themselves as part of a continuum of animals and have polytheistic religions. I hope you enjoy it. It includes a cameo appearance by the world-famous Spooky the Cat, whose first appearance was in my book Life of Earth, which was published in the United States and in Taiwan.

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.

A church marquee in Durant, Oklahoma proclaims that people like me, who teach evolution, are calling God a liar. Well, if that is so, then I better watch out. But of course that is not what I am doing. I am just saying that fundamentalists are wrong about how to interpret the Bible. But apparently these fundamentalists believe that if you or I disagree with them about how they interpret the Bible, then we are obviously disagreeing with God Himself. They think that they are as personally inerrant as God himself. I think that they, who place themselves equal to God, are the ones who should be worried about God's wrath, if there is any such thing.

See this YouTube video for Darwin's response!

The Fundamental Problem

As a professor and author on the subject of evolution, living in Oklahoma, I sometimes come in contact with creationism. Not as often as you might think—my students seem to either like what I teach or internalize their anger. They do so because I tell them that I used to be a creationist—that I was wrong, but not stupid. And I provide evidence. I used to let them write papers to express their viewpoints, but so many of them plagiarized that I quit doing this. (The only openly creationist paper was one that the student bought from a website for $15.) The biggest problem with creationism in Oklahoma will probably be from the state legislature which, now totally in Republican hands, promises a crop of nationally notorious creationist bills.

In my writings and classes, we deal with a lot of evidences for evolution. But the most important concept in evolution is that Darwin did for biology what Newton did for physics: just as the planets move by natural laws, not because God pushes them (a belief for which Leibniz condemned Newton), so species have originated not because God made them but by natural laws. This is why Darwin said “…this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity…” in the final paragraph of the Origin of Species.

The reason that this is so important is that all the aspects of the world, from the stars and planets to the weather to biological life to the experiences in our human lives, the world runs by natural laws exactly as if there is no God. That is the fundamental problem in the comparison of the scientific and religious views of the world. Evolution is just a scientific admission of what we have always known: the world runs by itself, with no divine presence or influence.

The absence of God, or at least of any miraculous action on God’s part, is most noticeable in the abundance of evil and suffering in the world. If you saw a child dying in utter misery and pain, and you had the opportunity to do just one little thing to rescue that child, would you be able to ignore her cries and walk away? God can. Are you more loving than God? He has been able to stop His ears from hearing the desperate cries of billions of people throughout history, most of them innocent, or else has the self-control to block all loving response. Indeed, the innocent suffer much more than the guilty, if only because there are so many of them. This situation is consistent with godless evolution, but not with an all-powerful and loving God. If there is a God, it is not in this physical universe or in any other with which this universe or its inhabitants can have any contact.

The writer of Ecclesiastes (the book of the Bible that preachers like to pretend is not there) identified this problem 3000 years ago: the absence of God in everything from the endless cycles of the oceans to the injustices of daily life. It is a problem that Judaism has had for 3000 years, Christianity for 2000 years. Where is God? This is not something that began with Darwin.

This essay appeared on my website on March 29, 2009.

St. Charles

In his book Darwin Loves You, George Levine spends page after page insisting that he is not trying to write a hagiography of Charles Darwin. In this blog entry, I am taking the opposite approach. It is not my intention to literally make Charles Darwin appear to be a saint, but he had some strikingly saintly characteristics. I want to call a few of them to your attention.

First, he had the perseverance of a saint. He had experiments set up all over his house, he read everything he could get and corresponded with dozens of people around the world, despite his debilitating illness. Even when ill, he would force himself to walk on his thinking path (the Sandwalk). He wanted to know the truth and find the evidence for it.

Second, he had the passion of a saint. One of his main passions was his opposition to slavery. Desmond and Moore, in their 2009 book, demonstrate that Darwin got his concept for the Tree of Life from his conviction that all humans shared a common ancestor and that all were equal; he then extended the concept to the entire world of species.

Third, he had the mild manner of a saint. He was kind and fair. He did not act egotistical and mean the way some of his opponents did and do, such as Darwin’s contemporary Richard Owen, and our contemporary Tom Delay who dismisses all who accept evolution as slime-worshippers.

Darwin was a magistrate of his local district. One incident is recorded in which a poor man was accused of poaching on government land. The evidence was clear, and Darwin found him guilty and levied the required fine. But then, Darwin paid the fine himself. The parallel with Jesus Christ is unmistakable: Christians think that God levied a fine on sinful humans, and Jesus paid the fine for us. What creationist has ever done anything like what Darwin did for the poor man?

This blog entry is also found on my other blog, "Honest Ab."