Areas of Unrest

A Current Events Rant

My readers are spared another business travel rant by some extreme good fortune. My meeting in Colorado Springs ended early yesterday and I headed off to the airport to try to get an earlier flight home. This wasn't a real problem for the Colorado Springs to Denver puddle-hopper, but the gate agent put me on a flight from Denver to LAX that turned out to have a stopover in Las Vegas. I actually like Vegas (being a fan of architectural excess), but an hour layover there in between two flight segments of under an hour each seems absurd. Anyway, when I got to Denver, I saw that the Vegas flight was delayed and decided to try for standby on the 6 o'clock non-stop. The gate agent held out little hope as they were overbooked by 80 passengers. (It's a 747 so not as extreme as it might be, but that is still a lot.) So I went to customer service, got my ticket switched to the 7 o'clock non-stop and waited for the standby list to clear. And, not only did I get on - but they gave me an upgrade to business class. It's remarkable how much getting home in complete comfort (leg room! derriere room! and 2 1/2 hours earlier than I expected!) does for my mood. So that rant will wait another week when you can expect to hear me complain about the humidity in Alabama and the awful food at the conference I am going to Huntsville for.

Fortunately, listening to the news provides plenty to write about. There was a very infuriating story this morning on NPR about a family in Gulfport, Mississippi who are suing the local school district for not allowing their son to wear a Magen David (Jewish star) pendant. The school principal claimed it was a "gang symbol" and the idiots on the school board backed him up. An interesting aspect is that the Christian Coalition is filing a brief in support of the family bringing the suit. Pat Robertson of all people said that anybody who believes a star of David is a gang symbol is either ignorant or anti-Semitic. This is probably the only time in my life I will ever agree with him.

Which brings me to the news story over which I appear to disagree with every other on-line journal writer. Namely, the Kansas evolution story. In case anybody missed it, what happened is that the state of Kansas decided to remove evolution from the state biology curriculum. I have read pages and pages about what a terrible thing this is, how nobody from Kansas will ever be able to study biology in college, etc., mixed in which a general beatification of Charles Darwin.

First off, let me get my attack on Darwin out of the way. It has nothing to do with his promulgation of the theory of "survival of the fittest." (And I use the word "theory" here because he did and scientific experimentation to validate the fact of evolution came much later.) The problem I have with Darwin is that he published incomprehensible and inconsistent nonsense for years before The Origin of Species. Which would be meaningless - I certainly don't want people to despise me in future generations for bad ideas I had in my youth. Except for one little detail. Right before he wrote The Origin of Species, Darwin received a lengthy essay from a naturalist named Alfred Wallace, who was doing research in the Moluccas (a.k.a. The Spice Islands and now a part of Indonesia, though there is an independence movement brewing there, complete with riots and over 80 people were killed by police in the last demonstration). After reading this essay about natural selection, all of a sudden Darwin was able to "solve" the problem he'd been wrestling with for over 20 years. Right - and I am the queen of Romania.

To be fair, Darwin did give Wallace some credit. And Wallace seemed far more interested in carrying out his explorations than he did in public speaking. But stolen scientific credit still irritates me.

Be that as it may, there is obviously nothing to stop the state of Kansas from teaching Wallace's theory of evolution. And that is exactly what my point is. The state of Kansas did not ban schools from teaching about evolution. The state of Kansas did not order schools to teach creationism. The state of Kansas simply said that evolution will not be covered on the exams given to graduating high school seniors. This strikes me as a very important distinction. Personally, I'd do away with state curricula altogether and leave things to local control as my experience in New York was that the Regents exams were watered down trivia that was infinitely easier than anything that our teachers themselves would have devised.

So, yes, it's a relatively stupid thing for the state of Kansas to have done and the justifications were silly. But it has virtually no practical importance. Biology teachers throughout Kansas will inevitably continue to praise a plagiarist, biology students throughout Kansas will absorb the misinformation that sooty British butterflies are a proof of evolution (the white moth / dark moth example is not a very good one as the ratios never get much beyond 60/40 and the time scale is far too short), and fundamentalists will continue to send their children to religious schools where they've never taught any of this.

Incidentally, I wonder whether the Big Bang theory is on the Kansas curriculum and, if so, whether there is similar pressure to remove it. I hear far more complaining about biological evolution from the fundamentalists than I do about cosmology. Or is it just that more schools require biology than require physical science?

By the way, lest anybody get the wrong idea, I want to briefly state that I really don't understand why anybody thinks there is a conflict between science and religion in the first place. If you believe tha G-d created the universe, why wouldn't you consider it reasonable that He created it to appear as if it evolved? That's certainly consistent with Jewish interpretations of Genesis (e.g. Rashi's commentary that "a day to G-d is like a thousand years to man". At least I think it's Rashi; it's been many years and my memory is imperfect. Several scholars have also pointed out that G-d's days start before He creates the sun and the moon, so they have to be on a different scale). It seems to me that science and religion are asking and answering fundamentally different questions. Science is mechanistic, asking "how" did this come into being. While religon is essentially about "why" things happen. So any conflict comes from confusing these two distinct purposes.

Finally, to be perfectly honest, I've always had a hard time understanding why anybody cares about creation. From the standpoint of the physical (vs. the biological) universe, I can't see how it makes any difference. We have the world and it functions the way it functions and let's see what we can do with it instead of worrying about a few seconds in the far-off past. Evolution is a slightly different matter. I don't think that the origin of humankind makes much difference, but I think that understanding natural selection has some practical importance when one considers drug resistance amongst bacteria, for example.

That last paragraph is probably as good an explanation as any of why I became a engineer and not a physicist.