Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes (25 page)

Many current creationists seem equally pitiable in their pronouncements: can anyone take seriously a link between Darwinism and the four evil p’s?

But Mencken also understood the dangers, for he wrote in his final lines:

Do movements of intolerance ever start in any other way, given our pervasive tendencies toward geniality? Do they not always begin in comedy and end, when successful, in carnage? Who did not regard Hitler as an object of pitiful derision after the beer hall putsch. And who can read the famous words of Protestant theologian Martin Niemöller without a shudder:

Clarence Darrow understood the roots of intolerance only too well when he said in Dayton:

Ever the cynic, H. L. Mencken evaluated this impassioned plea: “The net effect of Clarence Darrow’s great speech yesterday seems to be precisely the same as if he had bawled it up a rainspout in the interior of Afghanistan.” We had better proclaim the same message today into a downspout that resonates across the nation.

Little Rock, Arkansas
December 10, 1981

THIS MORNING’S
Arkansas Gazette
features a cartoon with searchlights focused on a state map. The map displays neither topography nor political boundaries, but merely contains the words, etched in black from Oklahoma to the Mississippi: “Scopes Trial II. Notoriety.” I spent most of yesterday—with varying degrees of pleasure, righteousness, discomfort, and disbelief—in the witness box, trying to convince Federal Judge William R. Overton that all the geological strata on earth did not form as the result of a single Noachian deluge. We are engaged in the first legal test upon the new wave of creationist bills that mandate equal time or “balanced treatment” for evolution and a thinly disguised version of the Book of Genesis read literally, but masquerading under the nonsense phrase “creation science.” The judge, to say the least, seems receptive to my message and as bemused as I am by the fact that such a trial can be held just a few months before the hundredth anniversary of Darwin’s death.

The trial of John Scopes in 1925 has cast such a long shadow into our own times that the proceedings in Little Rock inevitably invite comparison (see last essay). I appreciate the historical continuity but am more impressed by the differences. I sit in a massive alabaster building, a combined courthouse and post office, a no-nonsense, no-frills edifice, surrounded by the traffic noises of downtown Little Rock. The Rhea County Courthouse of Dayton, Tennessee—the building that hosted Scopes, Darrow, and Bryan in 1925—is a gracious, shaded, and decorated Renaissance Revival structure that dominates the crossroads of its two-street town. The Scopes trial was directly initiated by Dayton’s boosters to put their little town on the map; many, probably most, citizens of Arkansas are embarrassed by the anachronism on their doorstep. John Scopes was convicted for even mentioning that humans had descended from “a lower order of animals” we have made some progress in half a century, and modern creationists clamor for the official recognition of their pseudoscience, not (at least yet) for the exclusion of our well-documented conclusions.

I decided to be a paleontologist when I was five, after an awestruck encounter with
Tyrannosaurus
at the Museum of Natural History in New York. The phenomenology of big beasts might have been enough to sustain my interest, but I confirmed my career six years later when I read, far too early and with dim understanding, G. G. Simpson’s
Meaning of Evolution
and discovered that a body of exciting ideas made sense of all those bodies of bone. Three years later, I therefore approached my first high school science course with keen anticipation. In a year of biology, I would surely learn all about evolution. Imagine my disappointment when the teacher granted Mr. Darwin and his entire legacy only an apologetic two days at the very end of a trying year. I always wondered why, but was too shy to ask. Then I just forgot my question and continued to study on my own.

Six months ago, in a secondhand bookstore, I found a copy of my old high school text,
Modern Biology
, by T. J. Moon, P. B. Mann, and J. H. Otto. We all appreciate how powerful an unexpected sight or odor can be in triggering a distant “remembrance of things past.” I knew what I had the minute I saw that familiar red binding with its embossed microscope in silver and its frontispiece in garish color, showing a busy beaver at work. The book, previously the property of a certain “Lefty,” was soon mine for ninety-five cents.

Now, more than half a life later (I studied high school biology in 1956), I finally understand why Mrs. Blenderman had neglected the subject that so passionately interested me. I had been a victim of Scopes’s ghost (or rather, of his adversary, Bryan’s). Most people view the Scopes trial as a victory for evolution, if only because Paul Muni and Spencer Tracy served Clarence Darrow so well in theatrical and film versions of
Inherit the Wind
, and because the trial triggered an outpouring of popular literature by aggrieved and outraged evolutionists. Scopes’s conviction (later quashed on a technicality) had been a mere formality; the battle for evolution had been won in the court of public opinion. Would it were so. As several historians have shown, the Scopes trial was a rousing defeat. It abetted a growing fundamentalist movement and led directly to the dilution or elimination of evolution from all popular high school texts in the United States (see bibliography for works of Grabiner and Miller, and of Nelkin). No arm of the industry is as cowardly and conservative as the publishers of public school texts—markets of millions are not easily ignored. The situation did not change until 1957, a year too late for me, when the Russian Sputnik provoked a searching inquiry into the shameful state of science education in America’s high schools.

Moon, Mann, and Otto commanded the lion’s share of the market in the mid-1950s; readers of my generation will probably experience that exhilarating sense of
déjà vu
with me. Like many popular books, it was the altered descendant of several earlier editions. The first,
Biology for Beginners
, by Truman J. Moon, was published in 1921, before the Scopes trial. Its frontispiece substituted Mr. Darwin for the industrious beaver, and its text reflected a thorough immersion in evolution as the focal subject of the life sciences. Its preface proclaimed: “The course emphasizes the fact that biology is a unit science, based on the fundamental idea of evolution rather than a forced combination of portions of botany, zoology and hygiene.” Its text contains several chapters on evolution and continually emphasizes Darwin’s central contention that the
fact
of evolution is established beyond reasonable doubt, although scientists have much to learn about the
mechanism
of evolutionary change (see essay 19). Chapter 35, on “The Method of Evolution,” begins: “Proof of the
fact
of similarity between the various forms of living things and of their very evident relationship, still leaves a more difficult question to be answered.
How
did this descent and modification take place, by what means has nature developed one form from another? [Moon’s italics]”

I then examined my new purchase with a growing sense of amusement mixed with disgust. The index contained such important entries as “fly specks, disease germs in,” but nothing about evolution. Indeed, the word evolution does not occur anywhere in the book. The subject is not, however, entirely absent. It receives a scant eighteen pages in a 662-page book, as chapter 58 of 60 (pp. 618–36). In this bowdlerized jiffy, it is called “The hypothesis of racial development.” Moon, Mann, and Otto had gone the post-Scopes way of all profitable texts: eliminate and risk no offense. (Those who recall the reality of high school courses will also remember that many teachers never got to those last few chapters at all.)

This one pussyfooting chapter is as disgraceful in content as in brevity. Its opening two paragraphs are a giveaway and an intellectual sham compared with Moon’s forthright words of 1921. The first paragraph provides a fine statement of historical continuity and change in the
physical
features of our planet:

Now what could be more natural and logical than to extend this same mode of reasoning and style of language to life? The paragraph seems to be set up for such a transition. But note how the tone of the second paragraph subtly shifts to avoid any commitment to historical continuity for organic change:

Four pages later, we finally get an inkling that genealogy may be behind organic transitions through time: “This geological story of the rocks, showing fossil gradations from simple to complex organisms, is what we should expect to find if there had been racial development throughout the past.” Later on the page, Moon, Mann, and Otto ask the dreaded question and even venture the closest word they dare to “evolution”: “Are these prehistoric creatures the ancestors of modern animals?” If you read carefully through all the qualifications, they answer their question with a guarded “yes”—but you have to read awfully hard.

Thus were millions of children deprived of their chance to study one of the most exciting and influential ideas in science, the central theme of all biology. A few hundred, myself included, possessed the internal motivation to transcend this mockery of education, but citing us seems as foolish and cruel as the old racist argument, “what about George Washington Carver or Willie Mays,” used to refute the claim that poor achievement might be linked to economic disadvantage and social prejudice.

Now I can mouth all the grandiloquent arguments against such a dilution of education: we will train a generation unable to think for themselves, we will weaken the economic and social fabric of the nation if we raise a generation illiterate in science, and so on. I even believe all these arguments. But this is not what troubled me most as I read chapter 58 in Moon, Mann, and Otto. I wasn’t even much angered, but merely amused, by the tortured pussyfooting and glaring omissions. Small items with big implications are my bread and butter, as any reader of these essays will soon discover. I do not react strongly to generalities. I can ignore a displeasing general tenor, but I cannot bear falsification and debasement of something small and noble. I was not really shaken until I read the last paragraph of chapter 58, but then an interior voice rose up and began to compose this essay. For to make a valid point in the context of their cowardice, Moon, Mann, and Otto had perverted (perhaps unknowingly) one of my favorite quotations. If cowardice can inspire such debasement, then it must be rooted out.

The last paragraph is titled: Science and Religion. I agree entirely with its first two sentences: “There is nothing in science which is opposed to a belief in God and religion. Those who think so are mistaken in their science or their theology or both.” They then quote (with some minor errors, here corrected) a famous statement of T. H. Huxley, using it to argue that a man may be both a Darwinian and a devout Christian:

Now a man may be both an evolutionist and a devout Christian. Millions successfully juxtapose these two independent viewpoints, but Thomas Henry Huxley did not. This quote, in its proper context, actually speaks of Huxley’s courageous agnosticism. It also occurs in what I regard as the most beautiful and moving letter ever written by a scientist.

The tragic setting of this long letter explains why Huxley cited, only in analogy as Moon, Mann, and Otto did not understand, “the Christian conception of entire surrender to the will of God.” Huxley’s young and favorite son had just died. His friend, the Reverend Charles Kingsley (best remembered today as author of
The Water-Babies
and
Westward Ho!
) had written a long and kind letter of condolence with a good Anglican bottom line: see here Huxley, if you could only abandon your blasted agnosticism and accept the Christian concept of an immortal soul, you would be comforted.

Huxley responded in tones that recall the chief of police in Gilbert and Sullivan’s
Pirates of Penzance
who, when praised by General Stanley’s daughters for expected bravery in a coming battle that would probably lead to his bloody death, remarked:

Huxley thanks Kingsley for his sincerely proffered comfort, but then explains in several pages of passionate prose why he cannot alter a set of principles, established after so much thought and deliberation, merely to assuage his current grief.

He has, he maintains, committed himself to science as the only sure guide to truth about matters of fact. Since matters of God and soul do not lie in this realm, he cannot know the answers to specific claims and must remain agnostic. “I neither deny nor affirm the immortality of man,” he writes. “I see no reason for believing in it, but, on the other hand, I have no means of disproving it.” Thus, he continues, I cannot assert the certainty of immortality to placate my loss. Uncomfortable convictions, if well founded, are those that require the most assiduous affirmation, as he states just before the passage quoted by Moon, Mann, and Otto: “My business is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations.”

Later, in the most moving statement of the letter, he speaks of the larger comfort that a commitment to science has provided him—a comfort more profound and lasting than the grief that his uncertainty about immortality now inspires. Among three agencies that shaped his deepest beliefs, he notes, “Science and her methods gave me a resting-place independent of authority and tradition.” (For his two other agencies, Huxley cites “love” that “opened up to me a view of the sanctity of human nature,” and his recognition that “a deep sense of religion was compatible with the entire absence of theology.”) He then writes: