The other day I was watching a Nova episode called “What Darwin Never Knew,” about how modern science is helping us to better understand the process of evolution. My mind wandered a bit as I thought about finch beaks and gene sequencing, when a comment suddenly brought me back to the TV: a reminder that On the Origin of Species is only 150 years old.
When I think about evolution, I think in terms of thousands, millions, hundreds of millions of years — staggering numbers. I think about fossils and living fossils, like the vampire squid, and I’m overtaken by how utterly amazing the whole thing is. But focusing for a moment on the age of the theory itself, it’s staggering in another direction to consider just how long religion has been part of human history — thousands, even tens of thousands of years.
It’s said that if you look at the age of the Earth in terms of a 24-hour day, modern humans have been here for only a scant few seconds or minutes of that day. Similarly, the theory of evolution takes up a tiny slice of religion’s “day.” How far it’s come in that amount of time, and how much further it needs to go!
For most secularists (I assume there are exceptions), evolution is a fact as solid as the combination of sodium and chloride producing table salt. But it’s also a fact now for many religious people, displacing the belief in divine creation they would have held just a century and a half ago, about as long as the saxophone has been around. This, even though it’s not nearly enough yet, is a triumph of science.
A month before I was born, an evolutionary biologist — a winner of the National Medal of Science and a Russian Orthodox Christian — published an essay, the title of which is frequently quoted as an example of how evolution and religion can coexist. His name was Theodosius Dobzhansky, and the essay is “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution.” It’s beautiful how the light of God, even for a believer, is not what illuminates the features of our world, but rather evolution.
I haven’t studied evolution formally or extensively, so all of this may seem derivative and/or painfully self-obvious. (To the former, I assure you I haven’t been cribbing from anyone, and the latter ought to prove it.) These are just my layperson’s thoughts swirling around election time, when the issue of who is going to educate our kids is paramount, especially given the purely incredible finding that the U.S. comes next to last in its acceptance of evolution, according to a 2005 survey of 34 countries. With the perspective of the religious “day,” though, it makes a little more sense that we aren’t further along than we are, and even seem to be backsliding at times.
A lot of people are doing a lot of work trying to encourage scientific and rational thought, and furthering the acceptance of evolution. Sometimes it seems that all the work is only chipping away at the enormous edifice of religion and creationism. But it’s the very enormity of that edifice that illustrates the success evolution has had in changing fundamental principles about how we view the world.
Maybe biologists and other proponents of evolution need more patience. I’m not saying, by any means, that we should become complacent or stop doing all that work. I believe another Enlightenment is possible, in which evolution and other principles of science win out over myth and superstition again. I don’t believe, though, that we’ll see the changes we want to see in our lifetimes, or in the next few generations — or even in the next few centuries.
So maybe it is faith that we need, faith in the process of evolution as well as the theory. Evolution is clearly the “fittest” explanation of creation on our planet, and I do have faith that one day, someday, it will survive and triumph over its opponents. It’s just going to take more than a moment of religion’s time to happen.
