This Is What The New York Times Doesn't Want You To See

 

Race and Science

The race controversy engendered by the recent Executive Order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” represents only one front in this administration’s general antagonism against science, and against specialized knowledge more broadly. Science is being catastrophically defunded, its facilities and offices in the government are being shuttered, and the field of higher education is in a general uproar. Truth and sanity are always welcome, but they generally represent what science is providing, not what science needs to have imposed upon it by decree.

Biological anthropology, the study of our species and its origin, has had two watershed discoveries. In the 19^th century, we learned that our species is descended from earlier, extinct species similar to living apes. In the 20^th century, we learned that race and human variation are quite different things. 

By “race”, we generally mean the idea that the human species is composed of a fairly small number of fairly distinct kinds of people, each with their own inherent properties. It certainly seemed that way in the 1700s and 1800s. Over the course of the 20th century, however,  anthropology began to ask the question, what would the human species look like if we removed the lenses of race from our own eyes? Would we still see it? And if not, what would we see?

The answer has emerged gradually over the last few decades. Groups of people are differentiated from one another primarily culturally, in terms of their language, belief systems, personal adornment, traditions, knowledge, tastes, family relations, and all of the other things that cultural anthropologists began to study intensively in the early part of the 20^th century.

Now if you decided, for whatever reason, to focus only on biological distinctions, ignoring the primary dimension of human variation, what would you see? Actually, you would see that you can't make that distinction so readily, because so much of human biology is in fact strongly influenced by culture, from the shape of your head to your likelihood of dying from tuberculosis. Human bodies indeed absorb a great deal of the cultural world.

But suppose, however perversely, that you decide to ignore both cultural differentiation and bodily differentiation, and decide to focus exclusively on the human gene pool. Would you see race there? And if not, then what would you see? And the big discovery of human population genetics towards the end of the 20th century was that you don't see race; rather, you see nearly all detectable genetic variations nearly everywhere. Human genetic variation is primarily polymorphic and cosmopolitan. However it is measured, upwards of 85% of the detectable human genetic variation is variation within groups rather than between groups. That doesn't mean that there are no geographical patterns, of course.

So if we ignore the cultural variation, the bodily variation, and the primary, polymorphic, pattern of genetic variation, and we decide to focus only on genetic variation from group to group, what patterns do we find? Is race finally there? No, we find gradual change across geographical gradients, a pattern that genetic anthropologists describe as clinal. We find that people are similar to those nearby, and different from those far away – although even then, only in an ideal, non-urbanized, precolonial world.  The genetics of New York City is something else entirely.

If we ignore the cultural, the physical, the polymorphic and clinal genetic variation, then what is left? Do we finally uncover the primordial human divisions? No, we find that there are all kinds of interesting local genetic patterns in the human gene pool, with different cultural identities being associated with different genetic histories and with different probabilistic genetic risks at present. But those different genetic risks don’t map on to race: Pennsylvania Amish have their risks (polydactyly); Ashkenazi Jews have their risks (Tay-Sachs Disease); Afrikaners have their risks (variegated porphyria); Northern Europeans have their risks (cystic fibrosis). Racializing these differences only confuses things. Sickle-cell anemia is found in Saudi Arabia and Greece, as well as in West Africa. Why? Because it is associated with malaria, not with being African.  And these remain risk factors for particular populations, still afflicting only a small minority within each population – just simply a larger minority than in other populations.

When you look at the human species scientifically, this is what you find. It isn’t race. Race comes from somewhere else.

What then, do we mean when we say race is a “social construction”? We mean that it is a product of history, not of biology. What we have come to understand as race is the outcome of centuries of political relations between powerful Europeans and the less powerful – the English versus the Irish, the Christians versus the Jews and Muslims, European colonists versus Native Americans, traders versus African slaves. What they have in common is the formation of symbolic boundaries that function to establish and maintain inequalities. Those cultural boundaries sometimes correlate with biological features, which affords them some camouflage as apparent products of nature rather than of human invention. That is why even scientists were confused about it for two hundred years.

The fact is, however, that the average difference in lifespan between Blacks and Whites in America is due to racism, not to sickle cell anemia.  The lie of race is that it misrepresents the actual biology of our species. The fact that race is also there to perpetuate injustice makes race less of a fact of nature, and more of a fact of biopolitics.       

 This administration isn't making human biology unpolitical, they are making it exactly as political as it always has been. In this case, their convictions about race are anachronistic and their scientific ideas are from an earlier century, which is why they need to be presented as an order, rather than as a discovery.  There is no unpolitical human biology.

You tell me that it's evolution, well, you know...

It has been a frustrating several decades for science since John Whitcomb and Henry Morris published The Genesis Flood in 1961, the book that laid the groundwork for modern biblical literalist creationism. Those authors just flatly denied what science had appreciated since the early 1800s: that the earth is very old, and has been populated at different times by diverse creatures that were quite different from living ones, although frequently resembling them. While there has always been religiously-based resistance to Darwinism, it was a rare anti-intellectual who dared venture into “young-earth creationism”. Even William Jennings Bryan, Clarence Darrow’s antagonist in the famous Scopes trial, volunteered the fact that he was an “old-earth” creationist, to the surprise of both sides in the courtroom. 

DARROW:  Would you say the earth was only 4,000 years old?
BRYAN:  Oh no, I think it is much older than that.
DARROW:  How much?
BRYAN:  I couldn't say.
DARROW:  Do you say whether the Bible itself says it is older than that?
BRYAN:  I don't think the Bible says itself whether it is older or not.
DARROW:  Do you think the earth was made in six days?
BRYAN:  Not six days of twenty-four hours.
DARROW:  Doesn't it say so?
BRYAN:  No, sir.

In other words, “young-earth creationism” was too stupid even for William Jennings Bryan in 1925.

The Genesis Flood, on the other hand, began in 1961 with the premise that the Bible relates literal history; the Bible says that the Earth is merely thousands of years old; therefore it must be; and therefore all species lived at the same time, not so long ago. Almost as an afterthought, evolution must be false as a simple consequence of this biblical revisionism. This begged the question of how animals actually came to be fossilized, short of having been magically petrified by the visage of the gorgon Medusa; or how particular fossils came to be very consistently deposited in similar formations of rock layers, in spite of all that sloshing of the flood waters. It left you to wonder how the modern lemurs made it to Madagascar, and nowhere else; or how the koalas made it from Mount Ararat in the Near East all the way to Australia, without eucalyptus forests in between.

Most importantly, though, The Genesis Flood enjoined the reader to simply reject lots and lots of real and scholarly geology in favor of some dopey alt-geology. Where might such a bizarre suggestion come from? Saying that science has gotten something wrong is not in itself threatening. After all, when we teach that science is self-correcting, that is quite specifically what we mean: Science has gotten something wrong and we are correcting it.

The context of modern biblical literalist creationism bears some examination. Today it is fashionable to regard creationists along with anti-vaccinators, anthropogenic climate-change deniers, and flat-earthers, as part of a vast conspiracy of stupid. But there are two problems with this view. First, science is, and has sometimes famously been, wrong. When American geneticists of the 1920s said that we needed to sterilize the poor and restrict immigrants on account of their “bad germ-plasm,” it was the anti-science mobilization of the civil libertarians, social scientists, political conservatives, and religious Catholics that we can admire in retrospect for standing up to the geneticists. And second, we don’t know the degree of overlap among the anti-vaccinators, anthropogenic climate-change deniers, flat-earthers, and creationists.  Although some of them rationalize their beliefs with Bible verses, only the creationists are actually religiously motivated. In fact, even the creationists think the flat-earthers are nuts. 

St. Augustine, a Hippo

In other words, creationism represents a special kind of anti-science, rooted in a particular hermeneutic treatment of the Bible: selective biblical literalism. It’s selective because, as even St. Augustine of Hippo  recognized, when you read that Adam and Eve’s “eyes were opened” after eating the fruit in the Garden of Eden, you simply can’t imagine that they had been walking around the Garden with their eyes closed, bumping into things. It has got to be a figure of speech, not to be taken literally.

There is a different context for looking at creationism, however. Scarcely a decade before The Genesis Flood, the scientific world was scandalized by a Bible-based book of a different sort. It was called Worlds in Collision, written by psychoanalyst named Immanuel Velikovsky.

Velikovsky was not a literalist, nor was he concerned with the book of Genesis. His interest lay in Exodus, but his biblical focus was rooted in an equally ridiculous premise: Since all myths and legends are ultimately based upon real events (rather than just being stories, like Cosette and the Thenardiers, or Oliver Twist and Fagin, or Luke Skywalker and the Death Star) then what actual circumstances might have been the inspiration for the miracle-infused biblical Exodus from Egypt? In particular, what might have started things off by turning the Nile to blood, Plague Number One of Ten – or at least to something that Bronze Age yokels might have mistaken for blood? The subsequent plagues of Egypt would also receive naturalistic explanations too – frogs making their own amphibious exodus from the now-toxic river, then hosting insect vermin as disease made its way up the food chain, eventually culminating in mass deaths – hazily misremembered and misrecorded as merely the Egyptian first-born.

But what started it off, turning the Nile river to blood?

Velikovsky had an answer, and peppered his biblical exegesis as well with tendentious renderings of ethnographic and archaeological texts. What had turned the Nile red and undrinkable was red matter that had fallen into the Nile from the surface of the planet Venus. How did it get there? The planet Venus had just come into existence, having been expelled as a comet from the Great Red Spot of Jupiter; and was shooting through the solar system, eventually banging into Mars before both planets settled into their separate orbits just a few thousand years ago. It was an ingenious theory, with only one obstacle in its way: astronomy.  So Velikovsky invented his own alt-astronomy and settled into the #1 slot of the New York Times best-seller list in the Spring of 1950.

Needless to say, astronomers did not take this at all well. Sadly, though, they did a spectacularly poor job of engaging with Velikovsky’s work, beginning with threatening its publisher. Their fulminations were properly dismissive, necessarily technical, sometimes ad hominem, and occasionally incoherent. Eventually, though, Worlds in Collision faded from view, and today you can generally only find Velikovsky’s ideas by searching for them on the internet. Nevertheless, both Worlds in Collision and The Genesis Flood prominently cast themselves against science, and in favor of their particular interpretations of the Bible. One bluntly opposed astronomy, the other opposed geology. Yet the biblical text figures prominently in both, as misunderstood “history” in the colliding planets narrative, and as properly-understood “history” in creationist narratives.

We (in the human evolution community) have engaged most commonly with biblical literalist creationism as a false theory of biology, or as an archaic remnant of older modes of thought; but it is reactionary, not primitive, and treating it as a false story simply replicates the astronomers’ frustrating engagement with Worlds in Collision. It will always prove unsuccessful to engage with creationism as “our story is true and yours is false” – since at very least, many aspects of any story of human evolution are debatable or downright inaccurate. Indeed, both evolutionist and creationist narratives of human origins have at times freely incorporated racist elements.

But Velikovsky had fashioned a mold: a Bible-validating narrative, and the replacement of real science with his own. And he largely succeeded in focusing the resulting debate on the nature of the story he had to tell – science had theirs, and Velikovsky had his.

That was 1950. The Genesis Flood was 1961. And a decade after that, Erich von Däniken published his best-seller, called Chariots of the Gods?  Once again, the Bible figured prominently, but this time with God’s presence as mis-remembered and mis-reported visitations by ancient astronauts. And the only thing standing in its way was archaeology.

Yet while the colliding worlds astronomy scenario has all but vanished, young-earth creationism and the ancient astronauts are very much still with us. Creationism’s biology scenario is touted in evangelical churches across America, and the ancient astronauts archaeology scenario is touted on The History Channel. Approximately as any people believe it as believe creationism, and we have no idea how much those 40% or so of Americans overlap with one another. 

It’s not simply the rejection of science, but the arrogant construction of a different science, based in some measure on an idiosyncratic interpretation of the Bible. That is what connects the colliding worlds, young-earth creationists, and ancient aliens.  And one thing seems clear: arguing over whose story is right is not a successful strategy. “You” may believe that the planets have been more-or-less as they presently are for billions of years, but “we” believe that Venus is only 3500 years old. And why are you trying to disabuse us of that? Don’t we have a right to believe it? Come to think of it, aren’t you just being an intolerant archaic throwback to colonialist hegemonic practice?

The joint possession of secret knowledge is, after all, a pretty obvious form of social bond.  People who believe the Jets are going to the Super Bowl have something to agree on and to hope for together, regardless of any basis it might have in reality.

Would it give you pleasure to try and convince them otherwise? To me, that's a bit sadistic. I agree rather with H. L. Mencken, who said something like: Everyone is entitled to the belief that their spouse is attractive and their children are smart. 

Talking people out of their delusions can be fun, don't get me wrong. I just don't think it should be the goal of science education. It's one thing to teach what scientists believe, and quite another to insist that everyone believe as you do. 

Instead, we should be focusing on how scientific stories get made, and why their odd beliefs aren’t science. How do we explain appropriate scholarly practice to those who have never experienced it? That's the pedagogical challenge. But this is the complementary intellectual domain of the humanities:  turning the conversation away from the content of the science itself, and towards the nature of scientific epistemologies. That is to say, what makes something scientific knowledge as opposed to unscientific knowledge.

And sure, if you want to go for broke, why, in most contexts, scientific knowledge is more reliable than unscientific knowledge.

But this will necessarily be a humanistic conversation, and it may not be one that scientists are comfortable with, but it is probably a conversation that has a better chance of making a difference than just insisting that they’re wrong and you’re right.

Or, to put it in the non-scientific domain of morality: Don't be an asshole.

Science imitates art?

Once you deflect the accusation that a cabal of Jewish commie anthropologists is stifling discourse on human variation and that there really are just, like, four kinds of people – there really is an interesting question lurking behind all the nonsense.  Namely, if there really are, say, four  kinds of people out there, then how come nobody noticed it until 1684?  That’s the year that François Bernier, French physician and traveler, anonymously published the idea, in an early scientific journal, that there is a correspondence between a para-continental region and a particular kind of person.  Until then, European scholars had been content to see human variation as patterned  locally.

     Bernier’s idea passed largely unnoticed, but within a few decades that is precisely what the naturalist Carl Linnaeus and the philosopher Immanuel Kant were teaching about the human species.  What made the previously hidden pattern within the human species  suddenly so obvious?

     We generally point to three things that combined to construct this scientific fact (in spite of its empirical falsehood).  First, long voyages by sea, rather than over land.  By land, like Marco Polo, one tends to be struck by human continuity and local variation.  But by sea, one can be struck far more readily by the discontinuity between the people you left behind three weeks ago and the people you are encountering now, in the rest of the world in the 17^th century.  This would promote seeing human variation as discontinuous.

     Second, the encounter with unfamiliar and fluid social and political forms, often strikingly different from the carefully regulated borders and centralized governments familiar to Europeans.  This would promote seeing large groups of people as essentially homogeneous.

     And third, the development of science as a source of authoritative knowledge.  Science, to some extent, begins with collecting, organizing, and systematizing the diverse things one encounters in the universe.  The natural history that swept across the European academy in the 18^th century was predicated on precisely that kind of work, spearheaded by the Swede, Carl Linnaeus.  For Linnaeus, the most fundamental question was always “How many kinds of something are there”?  There were several kinds of mammals, of which one was Primates; four kinds of Primates (Homo, Simia, Lemur, and Vespertilio  [the bat]), two kinds of Homo (sapiens and troglodytes), and four kinds of Homo sapiens (americanus, europaeus, asiaticus, and afer).

     Clearly, Linnaeus was wrong about a lot of things.  But he did develop modern biology, which is why his face is on Swedish money, and yours isn’t.

     

     Yet of course the idea, whether to Bernier, Linnaeus, or Kant, didn’t come out of nowhere.  It turns out there was a sort of idea that the people of a single continent could be embodied in a single image, except that it was intended entirely allegorically, and not to be taken literally.  And that was 17^th century cartography.

     Before the discovery of America, world maps sometimes depicted the three known great landmasses.  But they didn’t tell you that there was a kind of person associated with each one.  The closest you could get was the idea that three sons of Noah – Ham, Shem, and Japheth – went forth and founded the peoples of Africa, Asia, and Europe, respectively.  But that didn’t go very far as a narrative of human differences, since they were all old Middle Eastern men, and brothers, to boot. (Around the world are the winds, and to the left are monstrous peoples.)

 

     

     By the late 16^th century, after the discovery of America, mapmakers begin to embellish their maps with images of people.  In this 1577 map by Gerardus Mercator, the figures in the corners are actually allegories of the elements of which the universe is composed: Earth, Air, Water, and Fire. 

     In fact, they are not just personifications of the elements, but embodied by the Roman gods, with Jupiter and Neptune on the left.  (I'm guessing Juno and Ceres on the right.)   But only a few years later, this 1592 map by Petrus Plancius is filling the corners with different information. 

     Yes, those are images of women, symbolizing the continents, with some of the trappings of the continent, and some of its native beasts, one of which is a kind of chair for the Continent-person.  America (which he calls Mexicana) sits on an armadillo, Africa is on a crocodile, Asia rides a rhino.  Only Europe is not seated on an animal, but eats from the Horn of Plenty.  (There are some bulls in the background, the bull associated with Zeus's visit to the continent's namesake.)

     Likewise, in this 1602 map by Hondius.  Now the  corners are filled with images of women representing the continents themselves.

And here are the women.

     Likewise, in this 1638 map by his son, Hondius.

     And close-ups of the people embodying the continents.  There's Europe, with her horse, stag, and horn of plenty.

And Asia, with a camel, some incense, and the wealth of the orient.

And there's Africa, uncovered and with an elephant.

And finally, America, feathered, and about to shoot an alligator with a bow and arrow.

     That was kind of cool.  Here's a 1652 map by Claes Janszoon Visscher.  He's got pictures of the Roman emperors at the top and bottom.  In the corners are the female personifications of the continents.

Interestingly, and quite uniquely, he doesn't stop there, for in addition to the female allegories, he also shows you what people look like.  Here are the Europeans (from Amsterdam), Asians (from Jerusalem) , and Africans (from Tunis) on the left side of the map.  And on the right are images of north, central, and south Americans.  The point is that he is communicating two things simultaneously: allegorizing the continents as female figures, and showing you what the actual people on the continents ostensibly look like.
     Here is a 1670 map by Philipp Cluver, or Cluverius (who died in 1622; they reprinted these maps quite extensively.).  Once again, you can see images in the corners embodying the continents and to some extent racializing them.

Here are the corner images, personifying the continents.  That would be Asia with her camel, Europe with her bull, America with something in a tree, and Africa with a lion.

One last one.  This 1676 map by Robert Greene.  Once again, the corners are images of the people of the continent.

     Yet all of these maps are earlier than François Bernier’s 1684 scientific paper, on a new division of the earth, beginning the unification of its continents and its human types.  The difference is that the scientists actually took it literally, while the mapmakers initially intended it as art – a simple allegory.
     By the time of Linnaeus’s first go at it, in System of Nature (1735), the image was already a familiar one.  Four continents, four kinds of people.

That would be whitish Europeans, reddish Americans, dark Asians, and blackish Africans.  He hasn't quite sorted out the color scheme, or the species - but he is pretty confident that there are four kinds of people, each associated with a continent.  He'll have that  done by the tenth edition of 1758.  And this will become science, because of Linnaeus's vast influence over systematic biology.
     But the image was there for the better part of a century in European cartography.  Each continent had its own person.  They just didn't intend for it to be taken so literally.  I think this is an example of science imitating art, by taking what was initially intended as an allegorical image, and having it become so familiar - and so reasonable, given the political historical relations I mentioned up top - that  it could be literalized and incorporated into the science of the 18th century.
     That is, of course, the scientific conception of the human species that Nicholas Wade promotes as modern, in his new book.

An early "Darwin Day" essay

On February 4, evangelist Ken Ham will debate television personality Bill Nye (“The Science Guy”) on the subject of creationism, at the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky.  It will be streamed live, and should attract considerable attention among those with an interest in the decline of modern civilization.

A public debate between non-experts is theater, not scholarship.  The debate is predicated on a critical misrepresentation, as if Creationism/Evolution mapped cleanly on to Religion/Science.  But it doesn’t.  Evolution is compatible with many theologies. 

Certainly creationism is religious, and evolution is scientific.  But aside from a bit of old revisionist  history, the judgment of modern historians and anthropologists alike is that science and religion can, and do, coexist peacefully for most people.  The reason is that science is a fairly narrow intellectual domain, consisting of a series of methods for establishing reliable knowledge about the natural world; while religion broadly encompasses social, experiential, and moral domains. 

Religion is so fundamentally an aspect of the human condition that, as scholars have realized for many decades, most people integrate religious beliefs and attitudes seamlessly into their daily lives.  The ancient Greeks had no word for it.  It’s not that they weren’t religious, it’s just that they didn’t separate and label it, as we do. 

Ritual behaviors extend beyond religion.  As football fans are well aware - with commercials for Bud Light invoking the old Stevie Wonder song “Superstition” – religious beliefs and attitudes hardly end at the outer side of the church door.  And as anyone who as ever shouted “stupid computer!” and smacked the side of their monitor knows, the attribution of sentient properties to inanimate objects – loosely called “animism” – is not limited to the formally demarcated religious domain.

Creationists today are a diverse lot.  Ken Ham represents “young-earth creationism”, rejecting not simply anthropology and biology, but geology and astrophysics as well.  That position existed back in 1925, when John T. Scopes was prosecuted for teaching evolution in Tennessee, and William Jennings Bryan held center stage as the nation’s leading spokesman for creationism.  But young-earth creationism was too dumb even for Bryan, who made it clear during the infamous trial that he accepted the great antiquity of the heavens and the earth.  He was an “old-earth” creationist.

A more recent version of creationism - “intelligent design”  - preaches neither an old cosmos nor a young cosmos, but presents simply a theology of negativity, whose adherents are united solely in their opposition to the naturalistic explanation of human origins provided by modern science.

But the modern conflict is complicated by two other factors. 

First, the cultural prominence of evangelical atheists, who would cast themselves not simply against creationism, but against religion more generally.  These people, however, imagine that religion is as narrow as science is – simply a set of alternative and false narratives about nature.  But these people do no favors for science, for its authority on natural matters does not extend to the cultural, ethical, spiritual, or esthetic domains.

Second, the mistake of lumping anti-vaccinators, climate-change deniers, and creationists into a single “anti-science” bin.  Nobody is “anti-science” – that person exists only in the mind of a paranoiac.  After all, Republican resistance to anthropogenic climate change is about business and money, not about theology.

Creationism is a poor representation of religion, whose basis is not merely an alternative narrative of our origins, but lies in the construction of a complex and very human social, emotional, and moral universe.  And atheism is a poor representation of science, whose methods were developed to study natural processes and make no sense when extended beyond nature – if indeed there is anything beyond nature, which science doesn’t, and can’t, know.

There are individual exceptions, of course, but Judaism holds that the Torah must be interpreted properly for every generation, and that only a poltroon would take it at face value.  The Catholic Church accepts the descent of the human species from earlier nonhuman species.  That leaves Biblical literalist creationism as a sectarian theological dispute within Protestantism.

It’s time to separate science from atheism, and religion from Biblical literalism.   The atheists and the literalists can slug it out, but the rest of us will continue trying to make decent intellectual sense of the things in our lives that science does explain and the things it doesn’t.

Nulture

Something  I wrote for popanth - Hot Buttered Humanity...

http://popanth.com/article/nulture/

Creationism as a problem in applied anthropology

I’ve been engaging with creationists in various ways for longer than most people have.  I met my first one in the graduate dorm at the University of Arizona around 1976.  I couldn’t believe it; I felt like I was talking  to a medieval necromancer. 

               That was a long time ago, over 35 years, and we have been spectacularly unsuccessful  in our engagement with creationism since then.  Obviously there are people who have worked wonderfully in defense of science education, like my dear friend Genie Scott, without whose efforts there would probably be twenty states banning the teaching of evolution altogether today.  But the fact remains that over the last twenty years or so, about half of adult Americans have consistently self-identified as creationists.

               Rather than ask what’s wrong with them ,why they are such morons, as one usually hears in this context, I think we should turn it around and look at that fact as a statement about the colossal failure of science education.  Now let  me make my point clear at the outset:  I am not denying that the creationists are ignoramuses; I am saying that that fact does not dictate a solution to the problem of creationism.  The solution comes from first identifying it as a problem of applied anthropology.

               Again, full disclaimer.  I am not a very spiritual person, and certainly not a creationist.  My dues to the National Center for Science Education are paid in full, and unless you’re Genie, I’ve probably been a member of NCSE longer than you have.  I can be an asshole, but I don’t believe that it makes for good negotiations.   When I taught intro physical anthropology at Berkeley back in the late 1990s, I had Phil Johnson come over and give a guest lecture on Intelligent Design.  I think my students (who already had heard about Natural Theology, because I gave them the intellectual context for understanding Darwinism) learned more about it from him than they would have from me.  And I learned more about it from lunch with Phil Johnson than I did from reading his work.  Or, as I once put it in the Anthropology News (Nov.  2005, p. 3)

Now there are a lot of intersecting political agendas here.  Republicans, for example, refuse to acknowledge anthropogenic climate change for different reasons  than evolution.  The first is about corporate economic interests; the second is about theology.

               Anyway, this post is inspired by a viral video  from a few months ago, when Louisiana was holding hearings to try and repeal the latest in a seemingly endless series of creationist bills.

               A retired science teacher named Darlene Reaves gives testimony, and is queried by a legislator named Sen Walsworth  about experimental evidence for “Darwin’s theory of evolution”.  He seems to take “Darwin’s theory of evolution” to mean, quite reasonably, something about the origin of people by a naturalistic transformation of simpler forms of life.  And he has heard that science privileges experimental results, so he asks her about the experimental evidence for human evolution.

               But rather than say, “There is a lot of indirect experimental evidence” and perhaps go on to talk about it, she responds with evidence for her idea of Darwinian evolution, which, again quite reasonably, means (to her) descent with modification and adaptation by natural selection. 

               Her initial response (@ 0:21) is about observational evidence, not experimental evidence, and the lawmaker corrects her.  She insists that he pay attention, and she goes on to talk about the fossil record.   This is nice, but it’s not an answer to the question.

               So he tries again, and asks her for “an experiment that proves [Darwin’s theory of evolution] beyond a shadow of a doubt.”  And she responds with a discussion of selection in bacterial colonies.

               There are only three things wrong with this response, as far as I can see.    First, even on a good day, it would have little to do literally with “Darwin’s theory of evolution” since Darwin didn’t know anything about bacteria, or how they evolve.  Second, even creationists generally will concede that microevolution happens, and as Darwin understood, you just need domesticated plants and animals to show it; the question is, can you extrapolate from that to the history of life?  The Origin of Species is, in Mayr’s famous phrase, “one long argument” that indeed you can.  But the point needs to be argued, because it is unprovable experimentally.  (The most important argument IMHO, is: If you can’t extrapolate simply and easily from microevolution to macroevolution, and there are  complications like speciation, then just how is that an argument for biblical literalism?)  Third, if we accept the unarticulated premise that there is a connection between bacterial selection and human origins, the fact remains that he is interested in people and she is answering about bacteria.  That’s why he asks @ 0:52: “They evolved into a person?”

               The questioner has asked what is, on the surface at least, a very simple question: Is there an experiment you can do to prove that humans arose by naturalistic processes from ape ancestors?  The correct answer would be “No” and to follow it with an excursus into scientific epistemology.   But that would require interacting with scholars in the humanities, and thinking about other things than biology – like history, anthropology, and philosophy – and that would probably hurt.

               So instead, we answer “Yes” and declare our interlocutors to be idiots. 

               Which is the strategy that has been failing for decades.

               But the history of colonialism shows pretty clearly that powerful groups who declare their antagonists to be ignorant fools simply manage to foster long-term resentments.  That is why I think this is an applied anthropology problem.  The lawmaker doesn’t understand the concept of model organisms – the idea that we can learn something about our own species by studying other, “simpler” species.  Explain it to them!   Otherwise the endeavor sounds like “the  old bait-and-switch” in which the scientist gives answers to questions that aren’t asked, and doesn’t answer the questions that are.   The stupid creationist is interested in human origins, but is being lectured about bacteria, and actually asks what that has to do with humans, because, as he says at @ 1:03, “I think that’s what we’re talking about”.  To which the biology teacher responds, “That’s not what we’re talking about.  We’re talking about evolution.”

               Sadly, the only modern ethnographic study of creationism is by a mathematician.  I haven't read it yet, because frankly I struggle with ethnography by actual ethnographers.  (There’s also the nice old one by Chris Toumey, God’s Own Scientists, but that was even before Intelligent Design re-galvanized the anti-evolution political lobby.)