teaching evolution

Charles Darwin's 200th birthday is coming up next year. To commemorate the bicentenary, a number of renowned museums have teamed up, shared their resources and expertise and put together a major traveling exhibition that has just touched down in London after being shown in New York City, Boston, Chicago and Toronto. Darwin and his ideas are on show at the Natural History Museum just across the street from Imperial College.

Even two hundred years after it was first proclaimed, the theory of evolution by natural selection still manages to create controversy in certain circles. I had thus far assumed these circles were restricted to the backwaters of rural America, but nonsense is apparently spreading. The museum has been specially training its facilitators, volunteers and any staff that's bound to interact with visitors.

One of the touchy subjects is the presence of fossils in the exhibition, pieces that have been dated to hundreds of thousands or even millions of years ago. Teachers of religious schools have asked museum staff if these fossils could be excluded from display because it would confuse the students. Confuse them because they have been miseducated to take Earth to be a few ten thousand years old. Don't ask me where this number comes from. It's obviously rubbish, and I get really angry when I hear the religiously confused (the teachers, not the poor students) spreading nonsense like this. I'd love to volunteer at the museum, though I fear that my combativeness wouldn't be appreciated.

Given that a rational approach has failed so many times in bringing sense to the discussion, I'd go all out, get irrational myself and try to beat the god-mongers at their own game. I have found out that religion cannot be debated with facts. The Mormons have taught me that. What I would like to achieve is the acceptance in my opponent that science explains life as we know it, whereas religion explains nothing and cannot be explained.

How do I try to achieve that? Easy. I invoke god. For the sake of argument, I accept religion and the presence of god. However, the god that I accept is the coolest, best and most powerful of all. At the beginning of time, he created the universe and gave us the laws of physics. He has been playing dice ever since because his creation was so successful that it started running itself pretty much immediately, with no reworking required. For day-to-day business, god is out and physics is in.

If someone tells me Earth has been created 16,000 years ago, I call him blasphemous. My divine laws of physics let me find out easily and with certainty that Earth is four-and-a-half-billion years old. If someone claims all living things were created, I ask if Darwin was created as well, and if so, if that wasn't a pretty poor move, given all the ruckus he has caused. If someone gets high on intelligent design, I'd have to point out the precariously dangling testicles of a bull and the misery and excessive death a colony of Emperor penguins suffers down in the Antarctic. If there's a designer, he was clearly not very intelligent. Laws of physics, in contrast, don't claim to be intelligent. They just explain how things work.

I could go on, but maybe it's a good thing I'm not often confronted with benighted religious views. Discussions without a rational base tend to fray and disintegrate. Explaining things without invoking god is much more gratifying because it's more direct and clearer. As one sees connections and relationships, things will start to make sense and one will remember them better and longer. I feel I wouldn't waste my time by going to the Natural History Museum and checking the Darwin exhibition out myself.