Occasionally Sayonara

Three weeks ago, I was asked a question that defied any possibility of providing a polite answer:

If God did not create Eve from Adam’s rib, why do women have one more rib than men?

This question came from a reasonably intelligent, middle-aged enforcement officer with whom I was patrolling the Leeds metropolitan district. He was driving at the time, in a heavily populated area, so understandably I did not want to distract his attention from the road by giving him the first reply that popped into my head.

Biological pedantry notwithstanding (”one more rib”?), the question is as intellectually obstinate as it is baffling. Of course, if God’s hand were not responsible for the missing rib, then there can be no other explanation, can there? Truth be told, at the time I didn’t actually know of any biological explanation, but I sensed this man would easily fool himself into entertaining the notion that the lack of a ready explanation is the lack of any explanation per se.

Such blind single-mindedness is the very root of the ongoing and frankly incredible siege against the evolutionary sciences. I use the word incredible in its literal sense; that of being “beyond belief or understanding”. How can it come to pass that so many people should be so misled?

At the risk of tarring everyone with sweeps of a broad brush, I categorise those who would besiege evolution into two camps: the unbelievers, and the disbelievers.

Let’s first characterise the unbelievers:

• Do not believe in evolution,
• Have not looked at the evidence,
• Do not strongly subscribe to an opposing philosophical stance.

The unbeliever is a minor siege factor in her own right; she does not believe in evolution because she has not been exposed to it. Were she to look at the evidence, she might well subscribe to the notions it supports.

The only means by which the unbelievers support the siege is by virtue of their numbers. There are so very many, that even small individual contributions accumulate to add significant force to the front lines.

Now the disbelievers:

• Specifically believe that “evolution” is false,
• Ignore or circumvent the evidence,
• Strongly subscribe to an opposing philosophical stance,
• Actively seek to damage the evolutionary sciences.

The disbeliever is a strong opponent of “evolution”. I have put evolution in quotation marks because it is a rare thing indeed to find a disbeliever who fully realises the scope of the evolutionary sciences, and what they oppose is very often (but not always, it has to be said) a strange reductionist fantasy that involves a modern synthesis of Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection and some nonsense about humans evolving from monkeys.

Disbelievers are active. They like to have something to hate, and they want as many people as possible to join them in expressing that hate, regardless of whether or not those others understand what they are hating or why they are hating it. The disbeliever is — in other words — the quintessential schoolyard bully.

Disbelievers are a problem because they have a stronger influence on the siege as individuals. They like to campaign, they spread lies, they will mock and cajole, they disrupt and they inveigle. They herd the unbelievers as the shepherd herds his flock; none shall leave the prescribed path lest they suffer the wrath of the crook and the dogs.

But what is a bully without an audience? Just as it is less entertaining to sit on a victim’s chest and pummel his face without a crowd to watch — without a crowd to cheer on in the hope that such an accolade will immunise them from suffering in the same way on future occasions — the voice of the disbeliever is nothing but a shrill annoyance if there is no horde of apathetic spectators throughout whom the words can resonate.

Take the enforcement officer I mentioned at the beginning of this post: he is a victim of ignorance, and nothing more. When I told him that I had studied biology at university, “evolution and ecology, that sort of thing”, he replied along the lines of:

Ah, well I might disagree with some of your theories, because my beliefs say otherwise.

These words betray an ignorance of pivotal principles. For example, one does not personally inherit an unwavering and unilateral belief in all pertinent theories simply by studying a science. Nor is it the case that a theory will only stand if no religious statements disagree with it.

Most telling, of course, is his odd (and apparently untested) belief that men have one fewer ribs than women. This is in fact not true. It is actually so very not true that in a perverse twist, a writer at Answers in Genesis has used it as “evidence” of the literal truth of the biblical story: Regenerating ribs: Adam and that ‘missing’ rib.

To summarise the above article for those who don’t like to follow links: some anti-creationsts mock Genesis because, if it is literally true, woman should have more ribs than man, yet she does not. However, ribs grow back, so Adam and Eve would have been equally costally blessed, and by extension so should all of humanity. Ergo the literal truth of Genesis is preserved: God one, Evolution nil.

To be fair, the article does not specifically or overtly make the case that this item of anatomical trivia preserves the literal truth of Genesis and by doing so vindicates God: I added that myself as a literary device which binds the thinking behind the article to the larger context of Creationist thinking as a whole. But I digress; the point is that our enforcement officer is likely typical of legion others who fall a modest — but not unrecoverable — distance from the fence, on the side of religiously-motivated disbelief in evolution. It is my belief that without the support of these legions, the siege will suffer gravely.

The issue then becomes one of education. How best to introduce massive portions of a population to multiple concepts and models which they are not already acquainted with, and which are unlikely to be found immediately attractive or engaging? Indeed efforts are already made by schools and colleges, and just look at how that has turned out so far.

Until this problem is solved, I don’t think we will see the end of this siege. In the meantime, please feel free to join me in stoking up the fire under these cauldrons of tar.